Cakey hands and happy hearts: How these immigrants are building a small baking empire
CakeyHand owners say they never imagined having their own bakery
Tucked away in a strip mall, Anna Paytyan decorates a multi-layer blueberry cake.
She delicately smoothes the icing onto the sides and effortlessly pipes balloon-like shapes on top.
Armed with her mother's Armenian recipes and her own wit, Paytyan is one of the owners of CakeyHand, a small bakery in Paradise, N.L., with a mighty reputation.
Her husband and business partner, Suren Margaryan, watches from the other side of the industrial kitchen.
The name CakeyHand, he explains, has two meanings.
"It's either a hand that makes cakes or is just a cakey hand. Like a kid puts his hand into a cake and it all becomes cake. That's the second interpretation. Different people interpret it differently," he says, smiling.
It's a far cry from their life in Armenia, but Margaryan and Paytyan call Newfoundland home now. Paytyan, the full-time baker, says she never would have imagined the life they've made here.
The bakery started at the St. John's Farmers' Market in October 2019 — an incubator for their brick and mortar store, which opened in 2022, and a gateway to the new location opening this week on Stavanger Drive.
CakeyHand come to life
In 2017, Margaryan left his life as a lawyer in Armenia to pursue a degree at Memorial University.
A year later, he returned home to marry his girlfriend.
Paytyan says they did everything backward: he came home, they got married, then they had an engagement party. And in November 2018, they came to Canada to start a life together.
"It was pretty hard, I would say, because I've never been away from my family before and especially from my mom," Paytyan says. "But I knew that Suren is my soulmate and we will have a great life together."
When she got to Newfoundland, she worked at Sobeys. The job, she says, got her used to customer service and helped improve her English.
But her husband kept encouraging her to bake.
"She always had this passion for baking, making cakes for friends and family from back in Armenia. And when she was here we were constantly trying to find some cakes that we used to eat back in Armenia, but we couldn't find them here," Margaryan says.
"When I first baked for Suren, he said, 'You should have a business, we should start a business together,'" Paytyan says with a laugh.
But she's a perfectionist — she didn't think she'd be able to bake for other people.
And what she did know, she learned from her mother.
"She made my uncle's birthday cake and I remember it was a two-tier cake with handmade flowers on it," she says. "She taught me how to pipe, how to use a piping bag, how to use a piping tip. And even right now I use some of her recipes in our kitchen."
In 2019, the couple set up a small table at the farmers' market, and to their surprise, they sold out.
"It was so exciting for us," Margaryan says. "We didn't expect that the customers would even pay attention to our little table. But they tried our products and kept coming back, and we kept selling out almost every market day."
Eventually, they packed up the Tupperware and the market tables and opened a bakery, and just like those startup days, they've been selling out ever since.
Market to mortar
In 2022, Margaryan and Paytyan opened their first store in Paradise.
Margaryan now works as a software engineer and manages the business side of things at CakeyHand.
"We were running out of space at home," Margaryan says. "We were running out of options in the commercial kitchens.… Demand was so high, we really needed our own space. And that's when we found this place in Paradise."
CakeyHand is a small, standing-only space with three spacious displays of baked goods.
In the back, there's a kitchen where a small staff bake her recipes — a staff of employees who Paytyan trains herself.
"You can find the recipe on the internet pretty easily. But, like, to actually make that recipe work is not that easy as people think," she explains. The way you use butter or the temperature that ingredients are kept at can change the final product, she says.
"I taught everyone how to bake, how to use our recipes, and how to make everything we do here."
But she says the business didn't come without hardship.
"I remember we had sleepless nights," she says. "And I remember even that, like, during the process of making a cake, I would even cry because I was that tired."
Now Paytyan can look at a recipe and know what she wants to change: a quality that makes her keen to whip up spontaneous new treats for the store, an ever-changing and expanding menu.
"If I look back, I wouldn't even imagine that I would come to Canada so far away from my country and someone would know me, like in Costco, let's say," she says, laughing.
"This is a great feeling, but it took a lot of time, I would say. And during those periods when you work really, really hard to create something, you put in a lot of sweat."
CakeyHand has now extended its reach a little further up Topsail Road to the Village Mall.
They installed a cake vending machine earlier this year, and much like the farmers' market, they have to restock every day.
The demand is so high in the shop, says Margaryan, they need an expansion to keep up.
And the Stavanger Drive location — another strip mall bakery — will offer more than just a sitting area. Paytyan says they will host birthday parties where kids can make and decorate their own cakes.
And, for those feeling like learning a new skill, she will spearhead baking classes in the new building.
Working together
Before the inauguration of CakeyHand, Margaryan had never baked before.
"The way I got into baking is to help out my wife Anna," he says.
With the demand at the farmers' market so high, he started helping her with the orders. And eventually, it turned into a passion of his, too.
"Step by step I started doing different things, whatever she asked me to do.… It would be like cutting cakes or rolling out the dough. Whatever it was, I started doing it and unknowingly I got into baking full time step by step."
And now, he can make almost everything in the store.
"She's a great teacher, by the way," he says, laughing with his wife.
"We fight a lot about different stuff, debating a lot, but that is what keeps us going. Sometimes I'm right. Sometimes she's right. Sometimes we find a middle ground, and looking back it's very fun and it's very rewarding."
"I think that we are the best couple because everything we try to do eventually happens," Paytyan says.
Download our free CBC News app to sign up for push alerts for CBC Newfoundland and Labrador. Click here to visit our landing page.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
