About the Bakery

Maria Contreras opened this shop on Franklin Boulevard in 2009 with a used deck oven and her mother's recipes. She still opens the shop most mornings, and she still mixes the concha topping by hand.

How it started

Maria grew up in her mother's kitchen in Guadalajara and spent a decade baking for other people's restaurants in Sacramento before deciding she would rather do it under her own name. The first year was mostly bolillo and conchas sold to neighbours who had heard about the place by word of mouth. Custom cakes came later, after enough people asked.

What has not changed

Everything is still baked in-house, the morning it is sold. The sourdough starter dates to the year we opened. Nothing is shipped in par-baked, and whatever is left at close goes to the Sacramento Food Bank rather than into the bin, which was the arrangement from the first month and has held ever since.

The part that did change

For years custom orders arrived by phone and by direct message, and during the holiday rush that stopped working. Messages piled up faster than Maria could answer them and a few orders genuinely slipped through. The order form on this site now collects the pickup date, the size, and the notes up front, which turned out to matter more than any redesign of how the shop looks.