| Cake wizard, kringle goddess, and gracious proprietor of Solvang Bakery, Susan Halme creates stylish cakes and delicate sweets for weddings, birthdays, and otherwise average coffee breaks. She has mastered the art of confectionery, and bakes everything from strudels and Danish, to bear claws, brownies, and graduation cookies shaped like mortarboards.
Since she and her husband bought their first bakery, Susan has assembled the world's largest kringle (a 6 by 8 foot act of will), baked for the Finnish Olympic team, and inspired Willard Scott to announce on national television that the cookies from Solvang Bakery were the best he'd ever tasted. Her personalized gingerbread houses made the news in Orlando, Florida, and Sunset magazine featured her goodies in its coverage of Taste of Solvang, an annual celebration that she co-founded.
Susan began baking in the late 1960's when, as a young mother raising four children in the snug burg of Ballard, she embraced the back-to-the-earth movement by spinning her own yarn, churning butter, and baking whole-grain breads. She learned the finer points of baking from Paul's mother, who also passed along some Finnish recipes that Susan still uses in the bakery.
Raised in Los Angeles, Susan claims no Scandinavian blood, but takes pride in the paternal English-Irish-Dutch heritage that links her to Benjamin Franklin, "that famous bread baker," whose strong, sloping nose, she laughingly admits, can be seen in her dad's features. Susan's father, "who was always in the restaurant business," owned local eatery Bray's 101 for 25 years, and instilled in her an appreciation for well-prepared food.
Susan and Paul Halme first ventured into professional baking when they took over the Danish Mill Bakery in 1981. At the end of eight years and a short-term lease, they packed up the mixers and gathered their staff, composed primarily of members of the hard-working Uribe family, and moved to their present location at 460 Alisal Road, where most of the Uribe clan still works.
"We had become such a strong group, I couldn't see myself not being in the business," Susan remembers, "flour keeps us happy and together."
Built in 1951 as part of Copenhagen Square, the building that houses Solvang Bakery originally held Birkholm's Bakery and a dress shop on the ground floor, with hotel rooms upstairs. Birkholm's set Solvang's tone as a pastry paradise, and employed many newly immigrated bakers from Denmark. Even today, after 21 years in the business, Susan, her partners/daughter Melissa, son-in-law Billy Redell, and her staff, including the "irreplaceable" Jeanette Ehresman, still do things the old fashioned way, using fresh, whole ingredients, like real butter, aromatic almond paste, and seasonal fruit. They work from authentic Danish recipes, first translated into English, and now available in Spanish, because they want to provide top quality sweets for "the people who care about their food, how it looks and how it tastes."
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"We hand roll everything," Susan declares. "We do everything just like the Danish bakers did a hundred years ago, because those were our teachers. It's a difficult challenge, because the Costcos of the world offer something called Danish, [but] it's not hand-rolled, it's not layered. It's sweet, but it's not delicate Danish pastry."
Whenever he can take a break from his law practice, Paul drops by to visit Susan, who spends long hours at the bakery. With 37 years of marriage behind them, they match the cadence of each other's speech, seamlessly interjecting ideas and finishing thoughts.
To salute his ongoing efforts to promote Finnish culture, an undertaking that he believes will help America win friends, Paul was named Knight, First Class, of the Order of the Lion of Finland, in 2000.
"I try to keep that to myself," he demurs, as Susan interposes, "It's a nice thing for all the work he's done to promote Finnish culture. He's put in a lot of hours." Paul continues, "my brother chides me all the time when I'm going someplace, 'are you going to wear your medal?'"
Paul's father was a Finnish Congregational minister, born in the U.S., but raised in Finland, who helped establish the Finlandia Foundation to promote cultural exchange between Finnish and American students. He taught Paul the value of serving others, an ethic that is reflected in his son's many involvements, from his work with the Southwest Museum, the School of American Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Finlandia University, to his past and present memberships on the boards of local concerns such as Elverhoj Museum, the Santa Ynez Valley Foundation, and the Cottage Hospital Foundation.
A native of Finland, Paul's mother funded her passage to America by skiing into the forest, from her village near the Russian border, to sell her home-baked cardamom bread to the lumberjacks. By the mid-1920s, she had saved enough money to cross the ocean, and make America her home.
Today, at 94 years young, she still bakes her own Finnish coffee bread.
Paul describes himself as a man of "Finnish extraction in a Danish bakery with Mexican bakers making Scandinavian specialties," then happily proclaims, "This is America!"
"Life is good!" Susan jumps in, then adds, "This is the best place to live in the world; I just can't imagine a nicer place, and I actually love coming to the bakery every day."
Taking some time for herself after two decades of hard work, Susan recently signed up for an art class where she relaxes in front of an easel, mixing oils and acrylics, instead of frostings and fillings. When asked to do a painting that described herself, she thought for a moment, then filled the canvas with a mouth-watering still life of delicate Danish pastries.
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