Owner of local bakery is living the sweet life
Five a.m. — The whir of mixers hum while Gary Cline flattens, cuts and rolls chocolate-flavored dough into perfect U-shaped croissants. He works on a long island table in a large back room that smells of chocolate and flour.
“I grew up with sweets as ingredients in just about every meal,” he said, before smearing chocolate paste and chocolate chips onto a flat croissant.
Cline, the owner of Chocolate Cafe and Bakery at the intersection of Monte Vista Boulevard and Central Avenue, starts his days at 2 a.m. It’s during this time that he balances the books, which includes paying employees and ordering supplies as well as any other administrative duties required for the day.
“I find the morning (to be) a magical time for me,” he said. “No one else is awake. It’s kind of neat. You get to see the best sunrises there are.”
Around 4:30 a.m. the baking starts. A yellow and bent legal pad with two letter abbreviations directs the flow of activity. Today — chocolate chip cookies, chocolate-dipped strawberries and chocolate croissants are at the top of the list. There’s a common theme here: Cline loves chocolate.
“What better way to get it than to make it,” he said while putting the croissants into the oven. “You get what you want. I’ve been disappointed (with) desserts in the past.”
The croissants are placed in the four-tray oven. Cline pulls a silver cup from a cupboard, a carton of eggs and a bag of flour onto the kitchen countertop. He cracks the eggs with one hand and then uses the shell halves to drain the yolk from the white. He’s making a crème brûlée and explains that the milk has to be heated to the right temperature otherwise it’ll scramble the eggs when he mixes the two. Cline’s knowledge and skills in the bakery come from 38 years of experience from baking in various local shops.
While beating the eggs, he puts the crème brûlée mix into the microwave at one-minute intervals. If he runs it for any longer the circuit breaks, and then all the clocks in the shop have to be reset. He adjusts the clocks once, but the next time the circuit breaks, he leaves it alone, so the digital LED flashes 12:00 … 12:01 … 12:02 … and so on. He has owned the Chocolate Café and Bakery for eight and a half years and works 14-hour days.
“It’s a pleasure to pass on a skill that’s dying,” Cline said. “This is my life. I have no other life. I have no wife. I have a girlfriend — she lives out of town. This is what I do, and I do it every day.”
His trainee this morning, Leanna Lopez, is mixing the dough. Cline tells her the dough sounds a bit heavy. He says his years of experience as a chef helped him become an experienced baker. His arms are marked with experience, too. Slight but present brands on his arms have touched the oven while removing trays. His left index and middle fingertips are covered in padded scar tissue from a pie roller accident years earlier. Even his assistant is gathering marks on her arms.
“I’ve always had a knack for it,” Cline said. “I come from a generation where you become one with your work. And at that point it all becomes magic and it just happens.”
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Cline now piles steel gray weights onto one side of a counter-balance scale. On the other side, he shakes sugar, flour and other ingredients at separate intervals. When he’s finished measuring, he dumps all the materials into the mixer along with some butter and milk, and then he’s off to prepare the next item.
Cline, a veteran who served in the navy during the Vietnam War, began baking after he finished his tour. He said baking was the only job available to him after the war, but he grew to love it.
After working various jobs as a baker for grocery stores and bakeries, Cline attended UNM where he got a bachelor’s degree in photography and a master’s in jewelry crafting. He said he chose baking over jewelry to support his family. However, he creates sweets in the same manner that a jeweler might sculpt metal. He explains that art is a way of thinking more than anything, and then he dumps a scoopful of chocolate chips into the cookie batter.
“You lose that drive to make money and it becomes part of your soul instead,” Cline said. “And it doesn’t matter if you make money or not, just whether or not you have communicated what you wanted to communicate with your medium.”
As he cleans butter and brown sugar from the mixer, the timer for the croissants rings, and he glides down the hall to remove the tray from the oven. He pulls on a set of burned oven mitts and sets the tray down. He pulls a jar of apricot glaze from an out of sight cupboard and brushes down the pastries, explaining that the glaze would tighten up the roll once it cooled a bit. He said it’s just all another part of the chemistry.
“My main concern is the eating quality,” Cline said. “Do you remember it after you have eaten it? Do you go back in your head and re-eat it?”
He returns back to the kitchen. The red clock now says it’s 12:35, but it’s about 7:15 a.m., and less than half of his 14-hour work day has passed. He piles the cookie dough into a bucket for his assistant to place onto cookie sheets, and then starts making a mix for peanut butter cookies. He pulls ingredients from the tops of fridges, from a back room and from under a movable island. He moves with grace and precision.
“It’s a form of meditation,” Cline said. “It’s how I do what I do. It becomes meditation, so it doesn’t become routine or the same thing on a daily basis. I have never been bored with chocolate.”
While he might consider baking meditative, the constant chimes and yellow note pad direct Cline’s actions more than anything.
“I tried Zen baking once and I burned too many things,” he said.
When the yellow list has been met for the day, Cline starts to shut down the shop at 3:30 p.m. Once the tables are cleaned and materials prepped for the next day, Cline heads home either to watch the Science Channel or to read. Right now he’s working on The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield. He’ll go to bed sometime between 6 or 7 p.m. so that he can get up early enough for the next day.
“I’ve discovered in my travels through life people who quit work and don’t have anything to do usually die,” he says and then begins mixing measuring flower and sugar into the weight again.
*Chocolate Cafe and Bakery
2933 Monte Vista Blvd. NE*
