Teens sell baked goods out of Central Library in first Great Startup Bakeoff

If you stopped in the Central Library on Sunday, perhaps you could smell rosemary wafting from the third floor.

If you followed the aroma, you would have found a group of Mt. Spokane teenagers peddling homemade focaccia bread, one of four teams that competed in the inaugural Great Startup Bakeoff. In the weekendlong competition, kids plan, bake, market and sell their own culinary masterpieces for the coveted golden apron.

“They kind of get a slice of what it’s like, if this is what they really want to do,” said Clay Cerna, River City Kitchen owner and organizer of the bakeoff.

Competitors spent half their day Saturday in the library planning their marketing strategy and the latter half in Cerna’s kitchen, whipping up hundreds of cookies, scones, churro bites and loaves of focaccia.

Many participants are interested in culinary careers and owning businesses. The competition gave the teens a glimpse into their potential future work. They learned about baking in River City’s commercial kitchen and entrepreneurship through the library’s business research collection, one of the best in the country, said business research librarian Mark Pond, also an organizer of the event.

“We’ve got tools; sometimes they’re really prohibitively expensive for them to go out and get on their own, but the library provides them for free,” Pond said. “If they took that message away, then I’ll count it as a win.”

Inspired by Sparks Weekend, the bakeoff is in its first year of what Cerna hopes will be a twice yearly recurrence in Central Library. He plans to organize a kids-only competition and one open to all ages to be set around the holiday season.

Entry was $50 for each student. River City Kitchen gave the students a budget of $100 for five ingredients (plus a spice) and materials for marketing their products, like decorations for their stand and packaging for their goods. Students kept any profits and tips they made. The winner is the team that makes the most profits selling their goods, “because that’s just like real life last time I checked,” Cerna laughed.

It’s a lesson Madison Stoltz doesn’t need to be taught. The Lewis and Clark freshman has been selling baked goods on her website for three years and will open a booth at the Perry Street Farmers market this summer under her business Snak Rabbit. On Sunday, she teamed up with three other teens to sell churro bites and chocolate ganache.

“I just wanted to gather more experience,” Stoltz said. “I like making people happy by giving them stuff that I’ve made.”

Peddling scones at the next table was a team of five freshmen friends from Lewis and Clark High School, forming the team Scone with the Wind.

“They’re the first thing that popped into my head that I hadn’t made in a while,” said team lead Lydia Canfield. “It was fun to make them, I went with a bunch of different recipes to try out one that we got was cinnamon streusel.”

The team assembled the weekend prior to the competition, test running recipes to find the best within the five-ingredient parameters. They tried cutting ingredients, only to find their product too bready or dense or bitter. All told, they made around 200 scones.

Dozens of loaves of focaccia bread lined the Mt. Spokane High School trio’s table like doughy shingles on a roof. Santana Alcayde, a sophomore, walked customers through the bread’s many uses: a side to a soup, dipped in cream, stacked with cured meat.

“I’m really interested in Italy itself, that’s why I picked focaccia,” Alcayde told a customer. “I want to learn more about their baking style.”

Alcayde, a cook at Downriver Grill, hopes to one day open his own Hawaiian restaurant like his late father. Fried rice will be his signature dish.

“I’m terrible at baking – I’m a great cook, but I’m a terrible baker,” Alcayde said as a customer bought a loaf. “This has helped me learn how to bake better.”

Next on his to-bake list are conchas, a sweet bread traditional in Mexico.

A team from Ferris High School and Chase Middle School sold out-of-this-world snickerdoodles at a space-themed booth called Cosmic Crumbles. The team spent almost 12 hours Saturday preparing, by baking over 300 cookies in varying densities to accommodate all preferences, making T-shirts and meticulously wrapping and taping their logo to each individual cookie.

“I think it was worth it because I feel like little details kind of go a long way,” said eighth-grader Otto Smith.

Team leader Elizabeth Veliz, a Ferris junior, knew snickerdoodles to be a popular choice. The team sold 75 cookies as pre-orders before Sunday’s event, using their social media in their marketing strategies.

Eighth-grader Avalee McPherson signed up for the competition to break up the normal monotony of her weekends, she said, but found it helped pull her out of her shell.

“This is actually a pretty uncomfortable position for me to be in,” she said. “I don’t normally like being in social settings like this, talking a lot to people, but this is actually helping me. I think it was really a lot more fun than I thought at first.”