Helen Bernhard was a young Lutheran pastor’s wife, as the story goes, who started baking cakes for the congregation’s young people in 1924. And she was a “spitfire,” a modern woman for the time who wanted to have her own business.
“She started baking more and more cakes,” said Mike Snaadt, standing in front of a case of cookies at Helen Bernhard Bakery on Monday. “Then she set up a little sink and a home kitchen.”
“They had a little shop outside the garage that they would sell cakes out of,” he said.
Now, 100 years later, Portlanders are still ordering up those cakes. They may be baked by different hands, but sometimes use the very same recipes.
The house and garage where Bernhard started her business are next door to the bakery that stands today, a bakery that Snaadt now owns with his wife, Kellie Snaadt.
While the Snaadts aren’t related to Bernhard, who died in 1968 at age 86, it’s still a family business. Kellie Snaadt’s parents, Richard and Mary Laufer, bought the bakery from Bernhard’s grandson, David Bernhard, in 1988 and Mike and Kellie Snaadt purchased it from them in 2010.
The recognizable white house at 1717 N.E. Broadway was built in 1939 to accommodate the growing business. Ben Bernhard, Helen Bernhard’s son, helped with that expansion and later took over the business from his mother.
On a Monday in May, 100 years after Helen Bernhard started selling pies out of her garage, the bakery emblazoned with her name is doing a brisk business in cookies and donuts.
The cases here are filled with almost any kind of pastry you can name – custard Danish, Mexican wedding cakes, iced cookies, cupcakes, scones, a pineapple upside-down cake, macarons, Mother’s Day cakes covered in elaborately piped flowers. On shelves along one wall is a vast selection of bread, from white to rye to dinner rolls.
All of it, save the croissants, is made in-house.
“We’ve got about 110 scratch recipes,” said Mike Snaadt, and “roughly 800 items.”
While the wide variety of products can be initially disorienting, it might also be a clue to Helen Bernhard Bakery’s longevity.
When donuts are popular, the bakery can pivot to making more donuts, when cupcakes are on trend, more cupcakes. But, when those things go out of style, they have give or take 795 other items to fall back on.
“From Halloween to Christmas, we do about 40,000 of these cookies,” Snaadt said, pointing to trays of individually decorated sugar cookies.
Before the pandemic, for example, bringing donuts to the office on a Friday was something of a workplace tradition.
“And that’s probably been the biggest loss for us with COVID,” Snaadt said.
It used to be commuters passing by the bakery on Friday mornings would grab a dozen or so for their coworkers. “Nobody goes downtown,” he said. “So our donut sales went from 100-plus dozen on Friday to 30 or 40.”
During the pandemic, the bakery was able to stay open with a limited staff, since they were selling bread. Even then they were flexible, Snaadt said, selling flour when there was a flour shortage and cakes that looked like toilet paper during the toilet paper shortage.
Snaadt also looks to his employees to lead the charge on experimenting with new products.
“I drug my feet on macrons,” he said, but his head decorator, Ricardo Reyes, who goes by Cha Cha and has been with the bakery for a decade, convinced him the bakery should make them and now the colorful piped cookies sell well.
Will Helen Bernhard Bakery last 100 more years? Snaadt doesn’t know yet if either of his children will take over the business, but recently he took nine days off to go on vacation and, with Cha Cha and others in charge, the operation ran smoothly. And, even if the Friday donut business isn’t what it once was, people still come in every day, looking for something sweet or something nostalgic.
Behind the case, you can still find cakes made from original Bernhard recipes. Grandmas bring their grandkids in to get a cookie at the shop they too used to frequent with their grandmas.
So, 100 years? That’s hard to say. But in the next five or 10, Helen Bernhard Bakery will hopefully still be there, serving up donuts, cakes, cookies and whatever the new trend in baking happens to be, for just as long as the people of Portland will have it.
– Lizzy Acker covers life and culture and writes the advice column Why Tho? Reach her at 503-221-8052, lacker@oregonian.com or @lizzzyacker
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