Sweet Claire’s bakery offers treats at day, night

The fresh smell of bread filled Sweet Claire’s Gourmet Bakery  as the employees prepared for the Bloomington Community Farmers’ Market.

April through June, Sweet Claire’s will be making more than 300 pieces of bread every Saturday for the Bloomington farmer’s market.

August marks the three-year anniversary of Sweet Claire’s,  a gourmet bakery located on East Third Street. It serves a variety of fresh breads, cupcakes and specially ordered cakes. On average, Sweet Claire’s makes nearly 100 pieces of fresh bread a day.

Owner Nel Hostetter  said her bakery is different from other bakeries because her business background in aerospace manufacturing. 

“I am applying those processes to here,” Hostetter said. “I use baker’s math to calculate my ratio, and I always find ways to make the process more efficient.”
Sweet Claire’s offers non-enriched sweetbread and their daily vegetarian soy chorizo bread filling called Kolache. Sweet Claire’s also uses King Arthur’s flour, a high-quality flour that lacks chemical ingredients. 

“The bakery business is really different now than before because there aren’t very many small bakeries now,” Hostetter said. “Everything here is handmade from scratch, where at big corporations it’s not. We get a lot of grad students, because it is quiet and they appreciate more of the high quality ingredients we use.”

Sweet Claire’s also serves a variety of organic teas and coffees and gluten-free bread. On Sundays, Sweet Claire’s offer Dutch pancakes, which are made with no yeast or baking powder. With the low margin and high labor costs of making wedding cakes, it now only makes its cakes by special orders.

Hostetter said that creating the cupcakes requires a good grip and a very steady hand.
“It’s a lot of tedious work,” she said. “Using Italian butter cream, you have to be quick because it melts pretty quickly.”

Junior Christine Bestman, an employee at Sweet Claire’s, said her job is extremely laid back. “I learn something new everyday,” Bestman said. “I get to learn how to make cookies, different doughs and I get a lot of customer experience.”

Throughout the year, Sweet Claire’s serves its baked goods downtown Saturday evenings from 10 p.m.to 2 a.m.  on its food truck.

Junior Audrey Brinkers, an employee at Sweet Claire’s, said she enjoys being in the food truck.

“It’s a lot different from being in-shop,” Brinkers said. “People are excited because we have something that a lot of other places don’t have and it’s cheap and people can walk and eat it.”