After being laid off from her job in an art gallery, Lucie Franc de Ferriere’s pandemic pivot to baking became a surprise success.
cakes—she has an intimate relationship with them in all their glorious forms, flavors, and shapes. “Cake is religious to me,” says Franc de Ferriere. “In France, the kids havewhere you have milk and a baguette with chocolate at around 4 p.m. It’s such a ritual, and I feel like a kid in a sense still wanting cake and Yorkshire tea every day at that time. But now, I’m an adult who gets to have a whole bakery for that—and to give it to other people for their own cake rituals.
It turns out that Franc de Ferriere’s first bakery is a lifetime in the making, even if it took a few diversions to get here. Originally hailing from a small town an hour or so from Bordeaux, her bucolic upbringing on a farm involved many years of watching carefully as her mother would cook for the guests staying at their B&B, the majority of her ingredients coming straight from their property. “There was always cake at our home,” says Franc de Ferriere, laughing.
When I ask why she didn’t consider relocating back to France to open a bakery, Lucie hesitates, noting that most of the cakes she has found in U.S. supermarkets are too sweet for her liking. Heavily-iced cakes aren’t her thing, and some of the typical flavors to be found Stateside don’t appeal to her palette. “Plus, if I’m being honest, I don’t have formal French patisserie training,” Franc de Ferriere adds.
It may be a gamble, but with the dramatic 180-degree turn her life and career have taken since the beginning of the pandemic, Franc de Ferriere is ready to evolve once again, more confident in her vision than ever. “I’ve learned that you don’t have to please everyone, and if you do, you manage to lose some of that authenticity,” she says. “You really have to believe in something if you’re giving it to everyone to enjoy.