BOULDER, Colo.—On a recent Tuesday, Sarah Haas set out recipes for six kinds of cupcakes, along with bowls and spoons, underneath a shelf of ingredients. The week’s selections were lemon lavender, carrot cake, banana honey mustard, vegan chocolate cake, red velvet and spinach berry.
As Haas worked on a master batter that would serve as the base for several of the mini-cupcakes, her baking assistant started to work on the red velvet.
“I do like baking,” Haas’ assistant said.
They laughed at their first efforts at red velvet.
“When we first started, (the red velvet cupcakes) were terrible,” Haas said. She nods at her assistant: “Her experience got it right.”
That experience extends from baking red velvet cake with her mother as a child to baking every Tuesday afternoon at the Street Fare Bakery, a small business run from the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless.
Haas’ baking assistant, who asked that her name not be used, is also a client of the shelter, living and working in its Transition program.
“Six different ways, we made them,” she says of how she tested cupcakes with Haas.
Hass adds: “The secret was that the milk was soured with lemon juice and no soda.”
Haas’ assistant is one of nine people who work with her in the program, two in the Transition program and seven in the shelter’s Housing First program. They make and sell about 1,000 cupcakes a week, currently at the Boulder Farmers’ Market and through special orders.
After the market closes for the season, Haas hopes to develop a catering business as well as sell the cupcakes at other seasonal markets.
The program got started this year with a donation of food. Some ingredients, such as eggs, are donated, and Lolita’s market gives $50 of ingredients a month, but otherwise the program is self-sufficient.
Clients work 4 to 16 hours, as part of their service in exchange for living quarters, or they are paid in-kind with such things as bus passes or gift cards.
A Boulder native, Haas began working in the shelter after graduating from college in 2008. She left to go to New York, where she worked in a cupcake bakery. She returned to Boulder and the shelter, where she started the program.
“Everyone has stories about food, memories of their family with food,” Haas says. “I had a friend tell me that there’s a lot of richness you can get just from … sharing food with someone,” she says.
On Tuesday, Haas’ baking assistant mixes red food coloring paste and boiling water.
“Sarah told me specifically NOT to cook the eggs with the red dye,” she says cocking an eyebrow at Haas, who smiles.
Haas noted it might sound frivolous to be working on cupcakes at a homeless shelter.
But, she adds: “That relationship we’re forming and the work we’re doing, it’s kind of important. It lightens up dark and hard to swallow issues. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing to connect as long as you’re working toward that connection.”
The connection is perhaps a little easier in a warm kitchen full of sweet aromas.
“When you’re homeless, you don’t have a kitchen and you’re certainly not thinking about baking,” Haas says.
Her assistant has found her way to the kitchen after a difficult journey, starting with severe depression after her 18-year-old son committed suicide 10 years ago. Although she saw that he was in trouble and worked to get help for him, family disagreements and other issues prevented that from happening, she says.
“He was a good person who didn’t get help when he was asking for help,” she says. “Now I’m going through systems he should have been in. Now I’m seeing places where he could have gotten help.”
Not everyone in the program bakes, Haas says. Shelter clients help with transportation and selling at the farmers’ market.
“It’s neat to watch people who started at the beginning being timid and fearful, really taking control and being such a public figure,” she says.
One loyal market customer is Sarah White, a local addictions counselor.
“All these little cupcakes on stands drew me in,” White says.
White says she has watched how Haas worked with other market vendors to incorporate items such as local granola and herbs into the cupcakes.
“I’m seeing how much this program has grown by connecting with other local vendors, to see how she’s doing that … the meaningful intention behind what she does,” White said. “It feels good to know she’s probably putting that same energy into the programs and needs at the shelter.”
