Around a bend along rural Red Hill Road outside Petaluma, where green and gold grasses carpet the hills and century-old barns hunker down like sentries, you’ll find one of Sonoma’s unlikeliest foodie treasures: the hobbit-size wagon that’s home to Mary Denham’s indie pastry project, Blooms End at Neighboring Fields.
There’s no sign along the road — it keeps blowing away in this windy corridor of the valley — just a sharp turn into the parking lot for Tenfold Farmstand. Right next to the 130-year-old schoolhouse-turned-market, you’ll find Denham’s tiny perfect world, which draws customers from across the Bay Area for croissant tarts smoothed with aprium jam, golden olive oil cake with oro blanco grapefruit cream, and savory Turkish urfa butter snails with garlic labneh and herb salad.
The rural location, with cows grazing the hills just beyond and barely any cell reception, makes sense for this highly creative artist who pours her heart into everything she does, from sourcing exquisite ingredients to restoring a vintage wagon to arranging seasonal blooms for her pastry displays. “I’ve always been more at home in the country,” Denham explains, pouring a cup of fragrant bergamot rooibos tea from Oakland’s Molly’s Refresher.
Just a few years back, Denham, who is in her early 30s and grew up in the suburban East Bay, launched her business with a series of Bay Area pop-ups, working out of a shared kitchen in pursuit of being her own boss and focusing on her love of baking. “I went to culinary school, I had worked in local bakeries and restaurants, and I was always observing,” she says. “I always knew what I wanted to do, which is bake every day, source every single ingredient thoughtfully, and then talk directly to every single one of my customers.”
Denham embraces nostalgia in many aspects of her work, dressing in vintage prairie and cowgirl clothes, piling her hair in a “Little House on the Prairie”-style updo, and speaking in a romantic cadence. Her darling, custom-built shop is not a trailer, for example, and absolutely not a food truck. “It’s a wagon,” she says. “I find words very important, for how we picture and experience things.”
Denham admits she cried when she first saw the wagon, loving its oval batard shape and coloring, but not its plainness. She transformed it herself, designing and printing custom patterns for curtains and wallpaper and building rustic wood shelves to display her pastries. Secondhand stores provided mugs, plates, and even the vintage printers letterpress trays that guests use to carry their feasts to the picnic tables on the schoolhouse lawn.
“After years of doing pop-ups, I had learned to build a world within the confines of a 6-foot folding table,” she explains. “So I fill the wagon with lots of vintage accessories and fresh flowers, and really create an altar to the pastries. Transformation is really all about the details.”
Denham takes that same thoughtful approach to her recipes. “I think sweets have this great ability to transport us back to our childhood, back to specific moments in time,” the chef says of her lacy tart hand-shaped to look like a rose stuffed with vibrant pink pearl apple slices, raspberry jam, and custard cream cheese.
For her signature coffee-cardamom monkey bites, Denham cuts cardamom and orange zest-infused croissant dough into little squares and tosses them with sugar mixed with coffee from Mother Tongue Coffee of Oakland — decaffeinated, she notes, since the bites are popular with children. As they bake, the sugars meld with the butter and the tops crisp up while the bottoms caramelize into chewy bliss.
Many customers are regulars, including Julie Cloutier, a Sebastopol ceramicist, who stops in with a friend at least once a month. “It’s like taking ourselves out on a date,” she says. “The drive out sets the vibe, and Blooms End is this beautiful dream world that we get a slice of.”
In a few more weeks, Denham will partner with Tenfold to host Tomato Days, an event she launched last year with tomato-filled pastries and pie, a funky, tomato-themed mixtape, and handmade tomato pins to hand out to fans. The pie itself, a southern-style tribute with heirloom tomatoes, cheddar, basil, and red onion, has proved so popular she now offers it all summer.
Keeping the ideas flowing isn’t a challenge, Denham says, packing a to-go box brimming with a Meyer lemon moon pie, a labneh-iced cinnamon roll, a bergamot- vanilla bean morning bun, and a smoked ham-and-Emmental croissant draped in homemade plum-currant jam. “On my days off, I like to go to vintage markets and estate sales,” she says. “And customers help me out. People see that I love prairie dresses and cute old things, and they’ll bring me them.”
Customers also ask, constantly, if Denham ever plans to expand, into a larger shop, an upscale restaurant supply, or even a franchise. And with a happy smile, she always says no. She’s seen too many other bakers get weighed down with the demands of bigger businesses with bigger overhead. “Most of the larger business owners I saw were not baking anymore, because you have to give a lot of concessions to make a business succeed in the traditional way,” she says.
She prefers to be the one getting up around midnight for a final bake, dressed in a band T-shirt and Carhartt overalls. She likes to accommodate pre-orders personally, since her stock sells out so quickly. And she still thrills to each day at the wagon, when she gets to put on a vintage dress and greet her customer-friends.
“It’s hard to make money at baking, with such a small business,” she says. “It takes over your life. But I absolutely love what I’m doing, every little bit of it, so it’s a joy to devote my whole world to.”
Blooms End at Neighboring Fields. Open 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Take San Antonio Road from Highway 101 towards the coast. 5300 Red Hill Road, Petaluma. 415-949-0654, blooms-end.com