Bunners Bake Shop. - Bunners simple & delicious gluten-free vegan treats

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To animal rights advocates everywhere, for their tireless efforts in the promotion of respect and compassion for all living things

I have always been a great eater. My parents nickname for me as a kid was Wilf, after my amazing but insatiable grandfather, who would eat the free butter at a restaurant as if it were an appetizer. But it wasnt the savoury or salty snacks that called me; my obsession was the sweet treats. From the first moments I was old enough to reach them, Ive been shooed away from trays of cooling cookies and told not to hover around dessert tables. To say that I have a sweet tooth is probably an understatement.

As a little girl I learned to make my own treats. I insisted on following each recipe to the letter, never letting my mother, a chef, derail me with her ad-libbed flourishes and wayward measurements. In high school I baked my friends muffins and cookies and delivered them in hand-decorated paper bags. Even in university, when my focus should have been on passing my next exam, I found myself deeply enthralled in the dessert chapters of cookbooks, daydreaming about all things glazed and frosted. Although at the time I couldnt see where I was headed, in retrospect its clear that I was meant to be a baker.

But about five years ago, my love affair with all things butter, eggs, and sugar changed. To gear myself up for a 30-day vegan challenge I was undertaking for my job as sales director for a natural cosmetics company, I watched a video on the PETA website called Meet Your Meat that completely changed my perspective on what was on my plate and in my mixing bowl. As someone who formerly ate her steaks blue rare and practically lived off Buffalo chicken fingers, becoming an overnight vegan was a pretty drastic change. At first I couldnt see how any of the foods I loved would fit into my new lifestylewithout dairy or eggs, baking cakes and cookies seemed impossible. But as the weeks passed, I began to adjust, and my love of food meant I was unwilling to just give up on the things I loved to eat. So I began to experiment with new recipes and new techniques and soon was thriving on my new diet.

Around that same time, another major change happened in my life. I met Kevin at a work function (we worked for the same company) and sparks flew. We were instantly inseparable, and in the way that new couples do, we quickly had nicknames for each other. I called him Kev (boring, I know!), and he started calling me Bunner because, as he puts it, I look like a bun.

Our jobs at the time had us traversing Canada, the United States, and sometimes Europe, which had been fun when we were both single, but we soon grew weary of our travel schedules and hated being apart so often. So, we committed to doing something brave and daring, something that would allow us to be our own bosses and give us the freedom to hang out with one another whenever we wanted. It had always been a quiet little dream of mine to one day open a bakery, and when I began caring more about the cookies I was serving at my staff meetings than the topics on the agenda, I went to Kev with my idea of opening a vegan bakery. To my delight, he was into it! Later, when we began brainstorming names for our new business, we were standing in Kevins office, rattling off all sorts of ideas and making scrunched-up faces at one another while firmly shaking our heads. I suspect it was something akin to expectant moms and dads trying to come up with baby names. Exasperated, Kevin sighed Bunner, and both of our faces lit up. We had a name for our dream.

Within the year I had left my job and took to the kitchen like a woman on a mission. Although Id kept baking since becoming vegan, I had been craving the treats from my childhood that I hadnt been able to find anywhere: butter tarts, birthday cake, donuts, waffles, pancakes, scones. I knew that I couldnt be the only vegan who loved the choice she had made but didnt want to have to leave moist, chocolaty brownies in the past. In the meantime, I had also become intrigued with the gluten-free diet, and basically all allergies; I suspected that if it was a bummer for me to give up my favourite things willingly, it must be horrible to have to give them up unwillingly.

So I started experimenting with vegan, gluten-free takes on the comfort foods Kev and I loved. I got my feet wet with a few simple recipes, for cupcakes and cookies, but soon realized that gluten-free baking was going to be just as challenging, if not more, than vegan baking had been. I was using all sorts of flours I wasnt familiar with, and had to teach myself through trial and error how each flour and starch differed in texture and taste, not to mention how they went with one another when blended.

While I was recipe-testing, Kevin was taste-testing. After every new baked good came out of the oven, I would get him to critique if for me. Sounds like a dream job, right? Well, having a manufacturing background, in which quality control was king, Kev took this role very seriously, and anyone who knows me knows that this could also be a potentially dangerous job (insert You think my cookies need what? here). That said, what Kev brought to the table was priceless. Not only did he often make the products better, but he really encouraged us to work as a team, which in turn made our business stronger. Even today, Kev is still tinkering with tried-and-true recipes and processes, giving them what we call the Mackie touch, and sure enough, his constant striving for improvement seems to better whatever he has his sights set on.

As the fall of 2010 swirled in and the farmers market where we sold our goodies closed down for the season, I continued to receive a flurry of phone calls (and the $800 cell-phone bill to prove it) from people who couldnt bear to give up our treats for the winter. It was shocking to us, but we were the citys only vegan bakery and the citys only gluten-free bakery. We had found a very heavily populated and untapped niche! Without a storefront to sell from, I took to the streets on my bike and spent a few months delivering muffins and cookies around the city, to the great excitement of my previously deprived customers. Before long I was getting requests for birthday cakes, so back to the kitchen I went, teaching myself how to make vegan, gluten-free cakes, and then how to frost them so that they looked as beautiful as they tasted.

By the end of that fall, it was clear that there was too much demand to keep filling orders from my kitchen. Kevin and I were feeling a bit overwhelmed, but we didnt have enough capital to rent a bakery space near our apartment in downtown Toronto. Exhausted after a night of fruitless brainstorming on what to do next, we went out for brunch in a west-end neighbourhood called the Junction. As we wandered around to burn off the scrambled tofu, Kevin spotted a tiny handwritten For Rent sign in a shop across the street. We took a look through the window and were surprised to see the landlady inside waving us in. It took only about 10 minutes of investigating the small but perfectly appointed space for us to decide it simply had to be Bunners. We dazzled the landlady with our charm and the next day signed the lease and gave her our first and last months rent. We opened our doors about two weeks later, and the rest is Bunners history!