Bake Up Pastries: 11 years running a cottage bakery in LA

📍 Los Angeles, CA
🔗 hotplate.com/bakeuppastries

Kimberly Gonzalez started Bake Up Pastries soon after California officially legalized cottage food businesses.

She was 24 years old and working as an assistant manager at a coffee shop in northern LA County. Her bosses had already tasted plenty of her baked goods and knew she wanted to bake professionally.

So when California created the Cottage Food Operation program, they encouraged her to look into it.

“They were pretty much like, you should look into that and maybe we would buy your stuff to put in the case,” Kimberly says.

That became the start of Bake Up Pastries.

Baking before every shift

Kimberly hustled to bake everything fresh in the early mornings before her coffee shop shifts.

“I would wake up earlier than I ever like to, bake dozens of pastries, get to work, stock the pastry case, drink a dirty chai and work my shift. It sounds lovely, but I don’t think that’s quite the right word for it, though I loved it. There was just so much I didn’t know about starting a food business from scratch.”

“It was such a lower barrier opportunity,” she says. “I thought, maybe I’ll really focus on this for five years and see how it goes.”

Working in the shop, she got to see people enjoying her products up close, making the effort even more rewarding. Customers quickly started noticing the pastries and asking if they could order desserts for baby showers and parties. Other coffee shops started reaching out, too.

By 2017, Bake Up Pastries had grown enough for her to pursue it full time.

Learning how to grow sustainably

Over the last decade, Kimberly has grown the business through wholesale accounts, farmers markets, catering, and direct customer orders.

For several years, she worked out of a shared commercial kitchen before eventually moving production back home and rebuilding her setup there.

“My husband’s very understanding because our house is a bakery now,” she says, laughing.

The move back home ended up changing her relationship with the business in an important way. While the commercial kitchen gave her more space, it also came with an hour-long commute each way, operational stress, and unexpected rent increases.

“I was just working nonstop and I was burnt out,” she says.

Coming back home helped her rethink what she actually wanted out of her business, and what she could do to run it most efficiently while staying true to her vision: intentionally sourced ingredients, fresh baked pastries, and creating moments of joy.

Building community through farmers markets

Today, farmers markets are one of Bake Up’s strongest channels. Kimberly has been selling at markets for years and loves the sense of community that comes with them.

“We love farmers markets,” she says. “We buy a lot from our other vendors. We love that community.”

Those in-person interactions have also helped customers connect Bake Up Pastries back to the coffee shops and cafés where they first discovered her pastries.

At the same time, she has continued expanding into larger catering opportunities and branded events across LA.

Those projects allow her team to work on larger-scale creative orders while still maintaining a healthier pace than the nonstop production schedule she experienced earlier in her career.

Protecting her time

One of the biggest lessons Kimberly has learned over the last 11 years is that burnout can sneak up quickly in the food industry.

Her advice now is simple:

“Set timers for yourself to take breaks, and treat them like oven timers,” she says. “Something or someone will get burned if ignored.”

That mindset has shaped how she approaches Bake Up Pastries today. She has hired two part-time employees, focuses on efficiency in the kitchen, and chooses opportunities that allow her team to connect directly with customers and be creative. Because of this, she’s now able to enjoy a more flexible schedule.

If you’re in the northern LA area, find Bake Up at the Old Town Newhall Farmers Market on Saturdays and Porter Ranch Farmers Market on Sundays. Be sure to subscribe to reserve your favorite treats and skip the line.