Sweet Success

Rick Nelson, Star Tribune

Oven-roasted tomato and goat cheese brioche. A flaky tart filled with the can't-miss duo of sweetly caramelized onions and brie. Cupcakes so lavish they put a smile on your face just looking at them. Breakfast pastries so sublime they may single-handedly extinguish the Atkins diet. Chocolate meringues that are the stuff of daydreams. Luscious burnt-orange creme caramels, packaged to go. Homey bars that put your grandmother's to shame.

This is business as usual at the Franklin Street Bakery in Minneapolis under the guidance of pastry chef Michelle Gayer-Nicholson. Within a few weeks, she has turned the corner of Franklin Avenue and 11th Avenue into a dessert-lover's dream.

Which should be no surprise given her background with pastries at Charlie Trotter's, the Chicago culinary temple long on the country's short list of stratospheric dining experiences. At the peak of her profession, her leap from big-city restaurant to neighborhood bakery seemed as unlikely -- and fortuitous -- as the Chicago Cubs' Sammy Sosa batting for the St. Paul Saints.

Michelle Gayer-NicholsonTom WallaceStar TribuneSince her February debut at the Franklin Street Bakery, the 33-year-old talent has been channeling her haute cuisine expertise into the decidedly less rarefied world of the neighborhood bakery. The results are grand-slam spectacular.

She and her crew of eight churn out a remarkable array of rustic-yet-refined pastries, cakes, tortes, cookies and other goodies, elevating standard-issue ideas with a confident combination of superior ingredients, vivid imagination and superb craftsmanship.

Franklin Street Bakery in South Minneapolis.Tom WallaceStar Tribune"She's a poet," Charlie Trotter said during a telephone interview. "Michelle has the lustiest, most sensual style of any pastry chef I've ever seen. She brings extraordinary passion to her work, and she's fanatical about using seasonal, pristine product; she'd rather cut her arm off than use something artificial. Chicago's loss is Minneapolis' gain."

When word got around among her peers that Gayer-Nicholson was kissing Trotter's goodbye and heading to the Twin Cities to, gasp, stock a bakery counter, many wondered about her sanity. She, however, knew what she was doing.

Playing with frostingTom WallaceStar Tribune"Hadn't I committed myself to grand cuisine long enough?" she said. "And who's to say I'm not living out grand cuisine in a bakery? What happened to a girl wanting to fulfill her dreams? I'm still cooking with humility and integrity."

Always a cook

Unflappable, modest and funny, Gayer-Nicholson exudes both big-city smarts and small-town warmth. Growing up in rural Iowa, she always harbored an interest in cooking. After high school she followed her instincts and headed to Kendall College, a well-respected Chicago trade school with a thorough two-year culinary program.

Her first post-graduation job took her to a St. Louis restaurant for a year. Then it was back to Chicago, where she was nervy enough to knock on the back door at Trotter's and ask for a job. As luck would have it, someone in pastry was honeymooning, and she got a four-day trial by fire. "They ended up firing the guy, and hiring me," she said. "How scandalous is that?"

Barely old enough to order a cocktail, she started at rock bottom -- third banana on the restaurant's pastry line, spending her nights torching crème brûlées and forging a remarkable relationship with the exacting but generous Trotter. After a few intense years of working her way up the food chain to the restaurant's top pastry position, she told Trotter she needed to do something different. Within a week he had arranged an apprenticeship with Nancy Silverton at the groundbreaking La Brea Bakery in Los Angeles.

It was an eye-opening experience. "At school, with French pastry instructors, all we learned was sugar shells, pastry creams and fruit gels, all perfectly decorated," she said. "That never clicked for me. But Nancy made me realize that the whole rustic thing is OK. Her scones would come out of the oven, glowing with the natural beauty of what happens when butter and buttermilk work together."

Which is why Gayer-Nicholson's work at the Franklin Street Bakery doesn't gravitate toward contrived, intricately finished sweets. "I see them and I think, 'How many times did they have to touch that, remold that, repipe that to make it so perfect?' " she said. "Natural, clean, simple. That's what I like to portray."

After a year with Silverton, she reimmersed herself in Trotter's world, first opening his Las Vegas outpost, then going back to Chicago for another long, enriching stint with her mentor. All the while her work took its cues from Trotter's rabid passion for the exotic and innovative.

It was a wild ride. Along the way she played a major role in launching Trotter's acclaimed upscale takeout operation, and the two of them penned a cookbook, "Charlie Trotter's Desserts," a sumptuous record of her tenure in one of the country's most influential kitchens ("She's like my little sister," Trotter said.) Last fall, Bon Appetit magazine singled her out as its pick for the best pastry chef of 2003.

But after a decade of exquisite, envelope-pushing, museum-quality desserts, the thrill began to fade. There was a downside to playing the palace.

"If I had to make one more petite, fluffy, crunchy, creamy, precious thing, or if I had to sugar candy-coat one more nut or flower petal, I thought I would lose my mind," she said with a laugh. "It got to where I used to look to my own book for inspiration and think, 'What am I going to make tonight?'"

Then the phone rang. A headhunter was on the line, hoping to pick her brain. Franklin Street partners Mark Haugen and Wayne Kostroski were on a mission to build the best bakery in the country, and could she recommend a top-flight pastry pro who could be lured to Minneapolis?

After tossing out a few names, she realized that she fit the bill. "My Jessica Simpson moment of the day," she said. "But talk about an amazing opportunity. I always wanted to run my own bakery, and I thought Minneapolis would be a great city to raise my kids."

A mutual admiration society was born. "We knew she was the right person right away, during the ride from picking her up at the airport," Haugen said. "She has such a passion for what she does, and it was nice to meet a pastry chef who is so down to earth. That's rare."

Through the window glass

A big window on 11th Avenue offers a view of Gayer-Nicholson's daily routine, and the show has quickly made her and her crew the city's most engrossing piece of improvisational street theater. When Haugen and Kostroski built the state-of-the-art facility last year, they made sure their building wasn't one big blank wall.

"So many times we hide our workplaces, and so we never see people making things," Haugen said. "That's why we wanted our building to be transparent. Now we've got kids with their noses up to the windows all day. It's fun."

While her family -- husband, Richard, a musician; stepson, Hakim, 10; and daughters Isabelle, 3, and Ava, 19 months -- sleeps, she's hard at work. (An ideal working-mother's schedule, she said. "By the time my kids are awake my [work] day is half over.") On a recent morning, outfitted in her standard work uniform -- a crisp white chef's coat and black pants, her hair tucked into a flat olive-green hat -- Gayer-Nicholson multitasked from convection oven to mixer to cooler to marble-topped table with the speed and agility of an Olympic athlete.

At the stove, a saucepan bubbled with almonds, cinnamon, nutmeg and vanilla, destined for twice-baked almond croissants. A golden pineapple reduction simmered in another pot, the foundation for a cake filling. An oven door opened to reveal a tray of rustic, palm-size polenta cakes flecked with rosemary. Buttery Danish, glistening with passion-fruit curd centers, and coconut macaroons, their shape and color recalling haystacks, cooled in a nearby rack. The room was on aromatherapy overload.

It's one reason why she got into pastry. "I decided that I'd rather come home from work smelling of cinnamon and strawberries rather than garlic and fish," she said, chasing it with a favorite expression. "You know what I'm saying?"

She knows bread, but prefers sweets. "It takes a certain kind of person to do bread," she said. "It's so anal, so precise, and any little thing -- the gluten percentages, the humidity -- can throw it off. I'm much more spontaneous, I like to wing it. With bread, it's all about rules. The bread is in control, you're not."

Front and center

After giving props to staffer Michelle Hoekstra for her deft work assembling tortes, Gayer-Nicholson headed for the door. "Let's go out front," she said, referring to the bakery's tidy retail store, visible from the pastry kitchen. "It's my favorite part."

On one counter, behind a low glass wall, several rows of cake pedestals groan under the weight of the kitchen's labors. She immediately praised staffer Sylwia Pawlak's arrangement of a plate of meringues. "I like to have fun with the pastries," Pawlak said to her boss. "You and me both," Gayer-Nicholson replied.

A wide case is lined with disarmingly simple cakes and tarts, a far cry from the standard marble-sheet-cake-buried-under-buttercream-roses genre. "Not that there's anything wrong with that," Gayer-Nicholson said. "It's just that there's more to life, you know?" Instead, her beauties include such inspired ideas as a green tea and ginger cake with lemon cream filling and white mascarpone frosting, and a flourless almond cake with a ganache center and milk-chocolate/ sour cream frosting.

The minimalist decoration provides subtle clues of what's inside. That chocolate-almond cake is lavished with chocolate curls, the sides imbedded, like pieces of a puzzle, with wafer-thin almond bark. The top of a German chocolate cake sports a propeller design done up in pecans, a preview of coming attractions; cutting the cake reveals layers turned on their side and twisted like a vortex.

Ice cream will materialize as the weather warms, and the counter offers impulse-purchase candies, too: spongy marshmallows and chewy, wickedly buttery caramels twinkling with Fleur de Sel. It's a bit of a shock to see a plebeian cake doughnut amid the splendors ("I'm just as surprised as you are," she said), but it's a something-for-everyone nod to the neighborhood's modest tastes and price range. But like everything else, even the doughnuts don't leave the kitchen without being kissed with what Gayer-Nicholson calls "a little love," meaning caramel streusel, powdered sugar tossed with instant espresso or some other finishing touch well outside the colored-sprinkles zone.

"It's my way of being OK with doughnuts," she said with a laugh. "God forbid I do something without a bell and a whistle."

After years of being buried backstage in Trotter's kitchen, Gayer-Nicholson is slowly adjusting to being in the limelight.

"It gets a little weird when people tap on the window," she said with a laugh. "This is an amazing facility, and it's great to be able to show it off. And putting it all out there for everyone to see really keeps you on your toes."

Rick Nelson is at rdnelson@startribune.com.

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