Put to the taste test The creator behind Anishinaa-Bakes knew a thing or two about pastries, but needed to slightly pivot with customers clamouring for bannock products By: David Sanderson Posted: 6:24 PM CST Friday, Dec. 13, 2024

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This article was published 13/12/2024 (643 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Have bannock, will travel.

Over the course of September, October and November, Melanie Parent, founder of Anishinaa-Bakes, a home-based venture specializing in pies, cookies, tarts and blueberry bannock rolls, appeared at close to 70 craft shows and sales throughout Winnipeg and southeastern Manitoba, sometimes two on the same day.

Things haven’t slowed down much lately. By the time Christmas morning rolls around, Parent will have participated in 18 affairs during the month of December, including the Pitâw Mīno Muskîkî Indigenous Handmade Market at Via Rail Union Station, 123 Main St., which kicked off on Friday and continues until Sunday, and the Downtown Winnipeg Farmers’ Market at Cityplace on Dec. 19.

Besides maintaining a schedule that would fatigue even a certain, jolly old elf, Parent also rises and shines as early as 2:30 a.m. on sales days, to ensure that every last item she piles into the back of her trusty Subaru Forester is prepared as fresh as possible.

The vendors who know her laugh because she’s almost always the last one to set up her station, often arriving with seconds to spare, she says, seated in a Southdale coffee shop, a few blocks from where she lives in Windsor Park.

“A lot of the time I’ll get there and my buns or whatever will still be steaming in the packages. Customers will go ‘oh, you must have made these this morning,’ and I’ll yawn and say ‘you got that right.’”

Parent, who is Anishinaabe on her mother’s side, grew up in Fairford, a community of 1,100 located 220 kilometres north of Winnipeg, near Ashern.

The second eldest of four siblings, she guesses she was seven or eight when she expressed an interest in assisting her mom and kookum in the kitchen, although her dad, who is French-Canadian, tells her she was closer to four, when she began standing on a chair, in order to reach the top of the stove.

“Probably the first thing I ever did was chocolate-chip oatmeal cookies,” she says, noting for starters she would have used her mom’s tried-and-true recipe, before sprinkling in spices such as ginger and cinnamon to bring things up a notch.

“I distinctly remember my family sitting around the kitchen table, each with their own full cup of milk, anxiously waiting for me to take them out of the oven.”

After graduating from Pinaymootang School, where she aced home economics, Parent moved to Winnipeg to enter Red River College Polytechnic’s culinary arts program. That led to positions at dining spots such as Resto Gare and Elements, as well as a two-year stint at the Delta Hotel in St. John’s, Nfld.

“A lot of the time I’ll get there and my buns or whatever will still be steaming in the packages.”–Melanie Parent

“(The Delta) was probably one of my best experiences,” she says, adding that almost without fail, shortly after starting a new job she would be assigned to the baking station, owing to her proficiency in that department.

“What surprised me was that Newfoundlanders have a bread called toutons that’s kind of like bannock, which we’d fry on both sides before topping it with molasses or syrup.”

Parent taught herself to make bannock at age 14, following the death of her maternal grandmother, who had previously been the person in their immediate circle responsible for preparing the yeast-free loaves ahead of large family get-togethers.

Parent switched gears entirely in 2016 by enrolling at the University of Manitoba, where she majored in psychology and minored in Native Studies. She was working as an employment counselor in 2021 when she contracted an illness she had difficulty shaking, which ultimately forced her to leave her job.

By the fall of 2022 she was fully recovered. She met with her parents in Fairford, to discuss what path she should take, going forward. She still enjoyed baking, her mother reminded her, and since the holiday season was right around the corner, why not apply to a few craft shows and see how she fared?

While it’s true Parent hasn’t looked back since heeding her mother’s advice, she was so new to the game at those initial sales that when people stopped by her booth and asked what she was calling her business, she shrugged and said it didn’t really have a name.

She quickly realized that wasn’t going to cut it, so one afternoon she contacted her mom again, this time to ask about the Ojibwe word for baking.

It’s really long, plus few would be able to pronounce it properly, her mother replied, before offering, “how about Anishinaabe-Bakes?’”

That’s kind of catchy, Parent thought. But what if she turned it into a pun, by dropping the last syllable in Anishinaabe and going with Anishinaa-Bakes instead? Perfect, they agreed.

During her first six months as an entrepreneur, Parent’s top sellers were pies (apple, raisin, blueberry or cherry) and haystack cookies (oatmeal, coconut and chocolate).

As she successfully applied to more and more markets, however, her Indigenous-sounding moniker caused shoppers to inquire about bannock. More specifically: why weren’t they spotting even a morsel on her table?

Her way of thinking was that everybody is capable of making their own bannock, so why would she ever bother, says Parent, who remembers complaining to her dad shortly thereafter how she hadn’t spent two years at culinary school learning how to make glamourous-looking pastries and dainties, only to turn around and peddle bannock.

“Anyways, it’s like they say, the customer is always right, so I started with plain loaves, then introduced raisin (bannock) and blueberry (bannock), as well as a savoury cheese-and-chive one. I also do bannock cinnamon buns, which is probably the most popular thing I make these days.”

Parent, who was walking through the mall last week when a person called out, “hey, bannock lady,” is immensely proud of what she has accomplished in just over two years.

“I also do bannock cinnamon buns, which is probably the most popular thing I make these days.”–Melanie Parent

Admittedly, there have been a few struggles along the way. She suffered from anxiety while attending high school and there are still days when she has trouble “putting myself out there.”

“I’m usually OK at Indigenous events, I guess because that’s my crowd,” she says with a wink.

“But if it’s a new market and I don’t know a soul there, I tend to be rather shy. Luckily I have a friend, Tim — I call him my brother from another mother — who occasionally helps me out and who is super outgoing, so that gets me to relax.”

Her father, who continues to live in Fairford, also lends a hand whenever she is double-booked, by hopping in his vehicle and making the 440-kilometre round trip to manage her booth for a few hours.

Down the road, Parent dreams of opening a café of her own. She has treaty status and friends encourage her to apply for funding through Indigenous avenues, only she’s never been one to “ask for things,” she says.

“That and I barely have time to do the paperwork, I’m running around so much.”

And although Parent’s final market of the season falls on Dec. 22 — she’ll be part of a pop-up event at Kildonan Place, that afternoon — she’ll still have a couple of days to go before she can park her measuring spoons until the new year.

“I’ve been going home (to Fairford) to do holiday platters for a few years now, mostly just cookies, tarts and bars, for Pinaymootang First Nation,” she says.

“My community has been very supportive, and my dad and I have our annual ritual of meeting up at Pinaymootang gas station to drop everything off. Once that’s through, I’ll help with Christmas dinner before really being done.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca