Before the sun rises, before the students wake for 8 a.m. classes and before even the most perfunctory of professors arrives for office hours, the Ithaca College campus sleeps…except for one room in a hidden nook of campus.
The Terrace Dining Hall is doused in darkness, the tables and chairs eerily empty and the buffets void of food. But a glow resonates from a corner of the dining hall, and the smell of melting chocolate and blossoming dough wafts through the chilly morning air, a bubble of warmth and sweetness tucked away from the world.
This is the Terrace Bakery, a place not known by many students or faculty. The bakery supplies pastries, cakes, cookies and other baked goods to all three of the dining halls on campus, along with places like Sandella’s and the library café. The bakery pumps out 2,500 to 3,000 baked goods a day, with fewer than 10 workers coming in each week to put cookies in the oven, ice cakes on their pedestals and make a general mess of frosting, cookie dough and muffin mix.
“When I go in, in the morning I love it because the bakery smells like fresh-baked cookies,” Beth Schomp, student baker, says. “It reminds me of home.”
The bakery hums music peacefully, the radio on at an audible but not deafening level. As the morning goes on and the sky gets a bit brighter, the staff grows from three people to four people to five. Everyone buzzes about, rotating around each other in a rhythmic method, one that can only be mastered through practice in half-woken states.
Brian Buchman, the bakery supervisor, strolls around the kitchen, happily surveying the lined baking trays, the mixer full of batter, the rising muffins in the oven. A curly lock of his hair sticks out beneath a white Sodexo cap, his smile omnipresent.
He found this job by chance on Craigslist, he explains. Before that he was the pastry chef at Ithaca Bakery for 16 years.
“This is more regimented,” he says. “I know what’s going to happen all the time with the scheduled breaks. There’s no wedding cake business or craziness during the holidays. I’m not baking dozens of pumpkin pies for Thanksgiving.”
Buchman’s experience in the kitchen certainly qualifies him to run the bakery — but he doesn’t do it alone. Though the staff in the bakery are few, they are committed. Baker Amy Mekos ices cakes with chocolate frosting, expertly rotating the cakes on their pedestals while smearing frosting on with a spatula. She has a degree in pastry arts and baking from the Niagara Falls Culinary Institute, and has been with the bakery for a year.
“When I was little I was in Foster care, and my grandma — that’s what I called her — we always used to bake for the other kids,” says Mekos. “So I loved doing this stuff.”
Mekos ices around 15 to 20 cakes a day. But her job doesn’t end in frosting — she also makes the whoopee pies, bakes for catering events on campus and assembles the Gifts from Home baskets. The Gifts from Home program allows parents to order a selection of pastries from the bakery to be delivered to their students as a care package.
The bakery atmosphere gets a bit louder — more people have arrived, the sinks are running, the mixer is beating and the music combines to create a cacophony of sounds. But the smell of pastries has grown stronger — sugary dough, blueberry muffins, chocolate chip cookies. The bakery sees these items every day, and Buchman finds comfort in the routine.
“The normal day-to-day routines are easy to handle. It’s nice to have the students program, where you guys help us out,” he says, smiling at the student workers buzzing around the kitchen.
The sink stops running and the mixer stops rumbling, and a peaceful quiet once again overtakes the bakery. Everyone works in unison, occasionally stopping to chat or joke around. In a place where you thought you would find a corporate mind, the tollhouse of Ithaca College campus, you could say there exists instead the feel of a family-owned pastry shop, a closeness, a comfortable vibe.
“I’ve been here for three years, so I just go in and joke around with the guys,” Schomp says. “We always have WICB on, so there’s always one person singing along with the radio.”
As the sun peeks over the horizon, illuminating Cayuga Lake, students and faculty arrive, compete for parking spots and pry their eyes open with a cup of coffee. The bakery keeps on churning, but it has a three-hour head start on everyone else.
