Keep calm and bake on

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/05/2020 (2186 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When life gives you lemons, make lemon tarts. Or lemon squares. Or lemon cranberry scones.

Belinda Bigold is the owner of High Tea Bakery, a St. James institution well-known for its British-style goodies. On March 17, Bigold, who founded the business in 2003 along with her mother Carol Bigold, sat down with her management team to crunch numbers.

Between March 12, the day the National Hockey League announced it was temporarily suspending operations to help slow the spread of COVID-19, and March 16, by which time the term social distancing had become part of the everyday vernacular, High Tea Bakery, 2103 Portage Ave., lost $30,000 in pre-orders due to the sudden cancellation or postponement of myriad weddings, birthday celebrations and charity events.

Forced to immediately lay off three-quarters of her staff, Bigold told the remaining employees the bakery would honour any orders still on the books for that week. Then she posted a message on Instagram and Facebook reading, “Closed for now, not forever.” Practically overnight, longtime regulars of the bakery began reaching out to Bigold on social media, wondering how they were going to “survive” the days and weeks ahead without their usual fix of imperial cookies, gingersnaps or snickerdoodles.

“Reading some of the comments was really humbling. It was so sweet people took the time to write and let us know how much our shop means to them,” says Bigold who, based on demand, began offering curbside pickup two days a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, near the end of March for people who placed orders online ahead of time. “At first I was thinking the last thing people would need during a pandemic is a cookie. As it turned out, lots of people were looking for a bit of normalcy in their lives, and wanted that special treat that makes Saturday still feel like Saturday.”

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The story of High Tea Bakery, always popular with royal watchers whenever Victoria Day rolls around, involves a rather odd combination of Australia, military aspirations, a parachute failure and ballet.

Australia is where Bigold’s mother grew up. It’s also where her father, Charles Michael Bigold, landed when he left his hometown of Powell River, B.C., in the early 1970s in search of adventure. Wanting to fight in the Vietnam War, in which Canada was not a combatant, her dad, who goes by Mike, joined the Australian forces instead. While Down Under endeavouring to become a paratrooper, a chute failure during exercises put him in traction for months, spelling the end of his military career.

After meeting, dating and getting married, Carol and Mike returned to Powell River. Bigold, the eldest of five siblings, was 12 years old in 1986 when her sister Melanie was accepted into the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s professional division at the age of nine.

“My sister was too young to live in residence here by herself so we were all dragged to Winnipeg, kicking and screaming,” she says.

Carol grew up near Sydney and baked in the kitchen alongside her mother and grandmother every chance she got. So it was a given that whenever the RWB staged bake sales, she happily whipped up dozens of lavishly decorated treats her daughter and other students would turn around and peddle to raise funds.

Recognizing her mother’s talent, Belinda mentioned in passing one day she was going to build her a bakery, a boast that became reality in 2003 when the two took over a 500-square-foot former auto parts store at 941 Portage Ave. (Her mother is “quite the Anglophile,” Belinda says, explaining the reason they settled on High Tea as their moniker.)

Six months after their November 2003 grand opening, the Bigolds received an email from former Free Press food critic Marion Warhaft forewarning them there was going to be review of their premises in the paper the following week. It was going to be a positive write-up, Warhaft mentioned, so they might want to stock up.

“We had no idea what that meant but we found out the morning the story ran, when we were completely sold out 30 minutes after we opened,” Bigold says.

By their fourth year in operation, the Bigolds agreed they were going to need more space if they intended to grow the business. One afternoon on their way home — they both live on the same block in St. James — Bigold did a double-take while driving past Doxi Lodge Grill, a locale she affectionately refers to as a “good, old-fashioned greasy spoon.”

At the precise moment they were going by, the owner was placing a for sale notice in the front window. Pulling over, Bigold implored her mother to call the number listed on the sign. A few weeks later they were the owners of the two-storey brick building, which included a second-floor apartment that has since been taken over by the bakery

Bigold laughs, recalling the advice the site’s former owner gave her while turning over the keys.

“He asked me why I wanted to spend all this money converting his place into some fancy bakery. ‘All you need to do here is serve toast,’ he said. ‘This is the biggest mistake you’ll ever make.’ ”

Of course, that didn’t turn out to be the case. In January 2010, High Tea Bakery made a name for itself when the Bigolds were invited to Los Angeles to take part in a reception for Canadian stars attending that year’s Golden Globes ceremony. The pair created more headlines a few months later when their best-selling treat, the High Tea imperial cookie, was among the goodies selected to be served to Queen Elizabeth when she and Prince Philip paid a visit to Winnipeg during a nine-day royal tour.

Better still: when British singer-songwriter and multi-Grammy Award winner Ed Sheeran appeared in concert at Bell MTS Place in July 2017, among the foodstuffs awaiting the ginger-haired entertainer backstage was a life-size cake, prepared by High Tea Bakery to exactly match his favourite guitar. (That’s not all when it comes to music giants; the Bigolds were also once commissioned by Janet Jackson’s record company to design cookies replicating the cover of her latest CD, which they turned around and shipped to industry VIPs across Canada.)

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If you’re looking for somebody to blame for “all this COVID stuff,” feel free to pin the blame on her, Bigold says with a smile. Following a major renovation a number of years ago that closed High Tea Bakery for almost a year and left her with a mountain of debt, the married mother of one was finally convinced this February there was nothing but blue skies ahead, after advance orders pointed to 2020 being a record year, sales-wise. To toast that bit of good news, Bigold treated herself to a present.

“I’ve always driven the bakery vehicle but 10 weeks ago I told myself, ‘You know what, the money’s good right now, you’ve earned this,’ so I went out bought myself a new car. Then the virus happened and I was like, ‘What were you thinking?’ ”

Despite the province’s announcement that relaxed some shopping restrictions effective May 4, Bigold is taking things slow for now. On May 23, she’ll expand the number of pick-up days customers can drop by to pick up pre-orders from two to three by adding Saturdays, but that’s as much as she’s willing to take on for the time being.

“There are two factors involved, the most important of which is everybody’s health,” she explains. “As their boss, I’m responsible for my employees and I’m not going to put them at risk just to try and speed up the business’s recovery. Also, you can lose so much more money by opening up fully and not having enough revenue coming in than you can by staying closed. So yeah, we’ll be playing it by ear for a while yet.”

One more thing; when the two of them started High Tea Bakery, Bigold, who has a fine arts degree, told her mother she’d stick around for three years, tops, before moving onto something “I really wanted to do.” With her mother now retired, she laughs at how things turned out in the end.

“Not only am I still here, 17 years later, the owner of my own bakery, I’m the only kid in my family still left in Winnipeg. If you’d told me either of those two things was going to happen 30-some years ago when we moved here from B.C. I’d have said you were out of your mind. Who’s the crazy one now?”

David Sanderson writes about Winnipeg-centric restaurants and businesses.

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca