Home cooks tend to be jacks-of-all-trades, as comfortable making salad as strawberry shortcake. This isn’t the case in the restaurant world, where the division of labor is so precise that the grill guy wouldn’t dream of crossing over into pastry territory.
Katherine’s French bakery in Aurora is no exception. “He’s savory and I’m sweet,” says pastry chef Katherine Keeley Pappas, referring to the lines drawn in the kitchen between herself and co-owner Mario Arrua, who handles the catering side of the business. While such specialization may be typical, the range and quality of Keeley Pappas’s sweets are not.
The ganache square ($2.65) alone is reason to visit. With three layers of rich chocolate cake, chocolate buttercream filling and rum syrup tucked under a chocolate ganache shell and topped with a pink sugar flower, it is lovely to behold and even lovelier to share.
Equally delicious is the almandine ($2.50), an individual tart with a thin layer of raspberry preserves and baked almond filling. If there ever was a dessert to persuade chocoholics to step out of their comfort zone, this is it.
Like a responsible parent (Keeley Pappas has one daughter, Nathalie) the bakery also sells soups, salads, and sandwiches, as if urging us to eat our lunch before filling up on dessert. The standouts include a smoked turkey wrap with mango, cilantro and curry mayonnaise and a quiche loaded with broccoli and asparagus. Other savories – 27 pages of them – are available on the catering menu.
As if the rows of croissants, éclairs, Eiffel Tower-shaped sugar cookies and tartes aux pommes weren’t enough of a hint, the bakery’s décor reveals Keeley Pappas’s lifelong fascination with France.
Framed French posters share wall space with metal letters spelling “Paris,” and the chalkboard menu welcomes with a hearty “Bonjour.” While Keeley Pappas doesn’t speak French, she did hone her pastry skills during an internship at a patisserie- boulangerie in Provence.
Most of the lessons she learned there are applicable to her day-to-day business, but gauging what will sell each day and how much to make of each item remains a challenge.
“It’s not like in France where people are carrying eight baguettes out the door every day,” she laments.
Maybe not, but if word gets out people might start carrying out eight ganache squares instead.
Gretchen Kurtz is a Denver freelance writer.
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Katherine’s French Bakery
French|2832-AA S. Havana St., Aurora, 303-695-5000|$.50-$40 |7 a.m.-6 p.m.|Tuesday-Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. |Saturday Parking lot.
Front burner: Traditional French pastries delight adults, while whimsical sugar cookies, decorated to look like smiley faces, flowers and the Eiffel Tower, are guaranteed kid-pleasers.
Back burner: The bakery is really a patisserie, since it sells scores of pastries but only one kind of bread.
