Woodlea

Here's to nostalgia..Today, en route to my mom's cardiologist appointment, we stopped for lunch at a little cafe in Bel Air. We've been there many times before, but this time, I took a seat looking out toward the rest of the shopping center, and saw...Woodlea Bakery. Now, if you grew up in Gardenville --or anywhere near Belair Road--in Baltimore, or went to St. Anthony of Padua School, you'd know the Woodlea Bakery. That was where you went after church on Sunday to buy a bag of doughnuts, or rolls to have with breakfast, or a cheesecake..or just about any baked goods that your mom didn't make. Forget this business of buying birthday cakes at the supermarket. Back then, it came from Woodlea's.

Beyond that, I went to school with one of the Hergenroeders--the family who owned the bakery. Almost everybody could say that because there were lots of Hergenroeders, and they lived in an apartment above the bakery. This was all rather exotic for me, as almost everyone I knew lived in a house with a yard and a sidewalk; certainly not above a shop.

But back to the important stuff. Seeing the sign, I asked my mom (who is not very dependable for information nowadays) if that was the same as the Woodlea Bakery I knew . When she claimed ignorance, I said I would just stop there after lunch if there was time and ask. Which I did, although it was unnecessary. When I stepped through the door and looked at the glass cases inside, I knew.

There were the doughnuts, the cakes, the lemon bars, the cookies...all the things I remembered and hadn't seen in forty years. I lapsed back into bakery nirvana, which generally means that I buy more than anyone could possibly eat while fresh. Cheesecake unlike the current two-inch-thick commercial versions with fruit toppings.. Woodlea's take has always had a bread-like crust, a layer of filling, and comes sprinkled with cinnamon. Doughnuts, marshmallow doughnuts. They were always my favorite--almost pure sugar. Honey-dips--now known as plain glazed doughnuts. Fat in its larval form. Bread and rolls and cakes of all sorts, looking just as they did when I could barely see into the glass cases.

I exercised great self-control. The visual was enough, really. I did get a bag of doughnuts for old times' sake, however. Two of the half-dozen were marshmallow.