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A neighborhood baker holds nothing back when it comes to cozy comfort

by Marisa Procopio

If passion can move mountains, there’s no question it can fuel a little bakery in Lawrenceville. And it does.

The sweet center at the heart of this story begins with the bakery’s name. Effusive chef-owner Joanne Canady-Brown coowned Let Them Eat Cake Bake Shop in 2011, and “when it was time to expand, I wanted to get back to my roots” she said. “I wanted a name that expressed how I felt about baking.”

The new name, The Gingered Peach, blows a kiss to Canady- Brown’s Georgia-born grandmother. (“She gave me the foundation of baking,” she said.) If her grandmother didn’t have a certain ingredient, she’d improvise—with style. “She was minimalist…. she’d just say, ‘That’s okay, dahlin’…just ginger it up.’”

A self-taught pastry chef, Canady-Brown put those words into practice in her first small space, which she took with very little capital, but found the gamble energizing. “I’m an optimist,” she added. “There’s something exciting when you don’t know what’s going to happen. In retrospect, I was a maniac…but I never worried about money. It will come. I’ll work with the bare minimum.”

She found a bigger home not long after. The space had occupied a bakery for 50 years, and the owner was looking for a very specific buyer. “He told me, ‘I want a baker. I’m tired of everything changing. I want to wake up in the morning and go to the bakery,’” she recalled.

The Gingered Peach menu is a deliberately un-glitzy collection of homey favorites, and it doubtless makes that previous owner proud. Virtually everything—caramel, doughs…all—is made from scratch, with simple, well-chosen ingredients. “Fancy stuff is nice, but that’s not who I am,” emphasized Canady-Brown. “The menu we have here is a hodgepodge because I am a hodgepodge,” she laughed. “They are the travels of my life.”

Nicole Spread

When choosing menu items, Canady-Brown stuck to two rules: “What do I think people like that they can’t get,” she explained, and “If we don’t do it great, we don’t sell it.” (The bakery doesn’t offer oatmeal raisin cookies, for example, because the owner hasn’t been happy with any recipes so far.)

Croissant dough—a notoriously long and arduous process— is made on premises. Why would she spend eight hours, every day, doing this? She replied that she doesn’t; she spreads it out over three days—a mistake in her practice with the dough giving the best-tasting result with the most developed flavor.

“I source locally when I can,” added Canady-Brown, referencing the beautiful produce in rural western New Jersey. The bakery even barters with a local farmer; she provides him with baked goods, and he provides her with produce.

“I want you to feel connected to this food,” she grinned. “You won’t feel connected to something you got out of a plastic wrapper. We rush through food all the time or are forever on diets…I don’t want you to feel guilty eating. I want you to feel comfort.”

The Gingered Peach
2 Gordon Avenue, Lawrence Township
609.896.5848 / thegingeredpeach.com