Like most of her family, Brianne Clay really digs peanut butter.

So when her mother, Vicki Clay, wanted to buy a cake to celebrate her graduation from Mattanawcook Academy of Lincoln this year, the elder Clay visited Twist of Heaven. Baker Jennifer Doyle spent most of a Saturday crafting the Lincoln family a cake with special meaning.

The two-layer square chocolate cake was smothered in peanut butter frosting and double fondant accents. Brown and blue lollypop sticks and a tiny brown graduation cap, complete with a miniature scrolled diploma, gave it graduate flair. The maroon lettering (maroon is one of MA’s colors) read, “Congratulations, Brianne.”

“Oh, my gosh, that looks great,” Vicki Clay gushed when she saw the finished confection. “She’ll be surprised because she doesn’t know that we’ve gone and gotten her a cake. It’ll give graduation a more personal touch.”

Two years ago, Clay wouldn’t have had such a unique surprise awaiting her. Baked goods were among the offerings of Dunkin’ Donuts, Hannaford, Pangburn Family IGA, Steaks N’Stuff and other food outlets, but nowhere in the rural Lincoln Lakes or Katahdin regions were there specialty standalone bakeries that could make such tasty treats.

Today, there are four: Effie’s Bakery and Catering of Millinocket, Randi’s Candies of Chester, Sweet Annie’s Bakery and Take-Out at Winn Farm in Winn and Twist of Heaven of Lincoln. Effie’s and Sweet Annie’s opened a year ago this month, Randi’s in October and Sweet Creations in August.

Explosion of bakeries

No one knows why the region exploded with bakeries, but the bakers have theories.

“A lot of people are trying to eat better, but some still like their sweets, too,” Effie’s owner, Lynn Oakes, said Wednesday. “Our products don’t have any preservatives. They won’t last as long on your counter, but there’s no chemicals. You can pronounce everything that’s in them.”

Sweet Annie’s owner, Valerie Ann Ferraro, and Randi’s owner, Randi Neff, believe home baking is a dying art. Neff said fewer people know how to do it. Ferraro and Oakes thought people have less time for baking, although home baking is still a very powerful tradition in northern Maine, Ferraro said.

“Nowadays, even up here where it’s very remote, a lot of people are starting to work five, six, seven days a week,” Ferraro said. “Now they have all these jobs and they are working all the time and it’s becoming more popular to go to a bakery to get what you like.

“Up here for many, many years, people all baked their own food and they went to a few local places that made their own stuff and that was enough,” she added.

All customers rebel against the cookie-cutter sameness of chain store-based bakeries, the bakers said. Many bring their own recipes, and the bakers are happy to take requests.

“There are only so many different kinds of cakes you can get in a store,” Doyle said. “It’s a case of having cakes that they know are fresh and don’t look generic. People want something that has a personal touch.”

“If you buy a Hershey bar, it tastes the same over and over again, but with my candy you have a little bit of variety, every time,” Neff said. “It’s never entirely the same.”

Lots of specialties

The four bakers are not specialists. They sell coffee, pastries and breads and feature well-rounded menus, but they also have particular things that they say make their bakeries special places.

Twist of Heaven offers 29 basic cake designs that each give rise to dozens of variations. Doyle bakes everything from spherical orange cakes for basketball teams to four-tier wedding cakes built with the precision of skyscrapers, although considerably more fragile.

“A lot of people don’t realize that there are other options out there,” Doyle said. “If they come to the bakery and buy a cake, they get very creative when they come back. They really get into the variety. They never get the same kinds twice.”

Oakes finds breads among her hottest sellers. Effie’s offers fresh loaves of white, shredded wheat, honey whole wheat, anadama, oatmeal, Italian, carrot fennell and rosemary romano and olive. Cinnamon swirl, raisin white and wheat breads, dinner rolls and buttermilk biscuits also go fast.

“The bread rack,” Oakes said, “is empty every evening.”

Ferraro bakes chocolate cream pies, napoleons, whole wheat and honey oatmeal breads, hard rolls and apple, blueberry crumb cakes and a banana split coffee cake. And watch out for her pecan caramel bars dipped in chocolate and her cinnamon buns, she said.

“I probably make the best cinnamon buns in the state,” Ferraro said. “It’s true! On Fridays this place is a zoo. I make real Italian bread and it’s not like anything people experience up here.”

Randi’s Candies offers pies, cookies and 800 types of candy, including anatomically shaped romantic treats that Neff suspects are seldom eaten alone by those who buy them.

“I call it naughty candy,” Neff said. “It’s filled with peanut butter and all kinds of stuff.”

Neff takes only special orders during the summer because the summer heat melts the chocolate too fast, she said.

‘I get to create things’

Some requests can mystify the bakers. Anadama – a delicious dark bread mixed with molasses and cornmeal – really threw off Oakes and her staff, Karen Birmingham and fellow baker Kim Rogan, when a customer sought it.

“Everybody knew about it but us,” Oakes said. “Everybody, especially the older generation, was like, ‘Oh, I haven’t had that in so long!’ It was an old recipe. We were like, ‘Oh, you know what that is?’ I had no idea what it was, but it’s soooo yummy.”

Ferraro honored one special request that she knows of only as “that Polish bread.”

“When someone brings me a recipe, I don’t copy it. It’s a private thing,” she said. “When your grandmother makes something for you, it’s yours. It’s a very private thing.”

Being a baker can require sensitivity, Ferraro said. Many customers are quick to share their negative opinions if they’re less than wowed by what they see in her shop.

“A lot of people come in here and say, ‘Oh, I cook that,'” she said. “I am starting to go toward selling supplies because a lot of my customers are cooks, and that’s one way of not offending them.”

None of the bakers is school-trained. All went professional to fulfill a niche or a creative yearning.

Neff became a baker to recover from a heart attack and escape the rigors of nurse’s-aide work. Doyle began by making cakes for her three children. Oakes offers catering, breakfasts and lunches as part of Effie’s, while Ferraro’s baking is an adjunct to other Winn Farm offerings, including dairy stock and goats. Her husband builds fine furniture and her son works on the farm as a blacksmith, she said.

“It’s fun. I get to create things,” Neff said. “Everything is unique so I am not making the same thing day after day.”

nsambides@bangordailynews.net

794-8215