Published in the Daily Hampshire Gazette on May 16, 2015
At the Tuesday outdoor market in downtown Northampton where vendors set up under tents, at tables and out of pick-up truck beds, Caleb and Emily Langer stand out. They sell their sweets from a pastry case sitting atop a three-wheel bicycle.
“We’ll have people come up and see our logo, and say, ‘What’s the connection with the bicycle?’ Caleb Langer said, “and I’ll say, ‘Well, we’re on a bicycle right here.’ ”
It looks like a modernized version of the old-time vendor cart you might have seen on big city streets in the 19th century.
“People think that’s really neat,” Langer said. “We have fun with it.”
Langer, 30, a Northampton firefighter who has long had a passion for bicycles, and his wife, Emily Langer, 29, a culinary school-trained pastry chef, have been running their “bicycle patisserie” Sweet Spoken for a year. For now, their focus is selling Emily’s confections and specialty candies at farmers markets. It’s the first step toward the brick-and-mortar place they hope to establish next year — a combination bike shop and cafe.
“We kind of had this dream for a long time about having a bicycle cafe, a place that people could come and check out a new commuter bike and have a cup of coffee,” Emily said.
The Langers live in Florence and do the majority of their daily commuting via bicycle, even with two children, Juliette, 9, Teddy, 3, and a third expected at the end of the summer. The bikes they’ll sell will be for getting around rather than sport.
“You can go down the street and see any number of people riding their bikes around but you don’t know where they are going or who they represent (cyclist vs. commuter) really,” Caleb said. “I think that that’s one of the things we’re looking for with having a bicycle cafe, is to bring those people from different walks of life together.”
Their ideal location would be in a concentrated area — like downtown Northampton— and near the bike path, where they would be accessible by foot and bike.
The Sweet Spoken way
Until then, the Langers will ride their three-wheeled bicycle to the Tuesday Market behind Thornes Marketplace every other week to sell their treats. While Caleb handles most of the selling, Emily bakes the goods — speciality cookies, fruit tarts and handcrafted chocolates — in their Florence home.
The bike is a Dutch import that the couple had had their eyes on because of the cargo- and kid-toting capabilities. When the bicycle patisserie is off duty, the cargo space has seats for the children to ride along in.
Caleb built a box that attaches to the bike which stores the pastry case and products during transit. The box becomes a platform for the case to rest on when they’re ready to do business.
The Langers fill the case with mostly French-inspired pastries with a menu that changes seasonally, Emily said. “Things you don’t normally see in every bakery.”
Last Tuesday, that meant fruit tarts, s’mores — whole wheat graham cracker sandwiches layered with chocolate ganache and marshmallow — chocolate chip cookies and brownies with a sea salt caramel swirl.
The Langers are limited in the types of pastries they can sell because Emily makes them in her home kitchen. Though it has been approved by the Northampton Health Department as a certified residential kitchen, she is restricted to making only products that are shelf stable, meaning nonperishable. That is tricky for a French pastry chef, she said, as it means no pastry cream.
“Probably 75 percent of the things you learn to do (in pastry school) involve pastry cream,” she said. “A lot of times, if I’m making a fruit tart, especially with fresh berries that aren’t cooked, I do a shortbread crust with a cream filling and berries on top. For our business, we can’t do that, so we adapt. We cook the filling, you make sure that it is shelf stable when you’re done.”
The eureka moment
The Langers moved to Northampton in 2013, when Caleb left the Huberston Fire Department to join the Northampton fire force. Before that, Emily had run an artisan bread-making business out of their home called Juliette’s Basket. As with Sweet Spoken, she sold her goods at farmers markets, but the demands of making bread in a small kitchen got to be too much, she said. So, she took a job as a baker for the Carter and Stephen’s Farm Store in Barre.
Once settled in Northampton, however, the couple began thinking again about their own business venture.
“We were trying to figure out a way we could do it before we actually had the money for a brick and mortar shop,” Emily said. “We thought about doing a food truck,” and then, one day when she was in the shower it came to her: “Oh, let’s do a food bike.”
They debuted their bicycle patisserie at Florence Night Out last September, a night were local business come together in downtown Florence to sell their products.
Next they became regulars at the Winter Farmers Market on Saturdays at Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School in Northampton and then when the Tuesday Market opened for the season April 28, they were there. They plan to return to it every other week as a bi-weekly vendor. Their next date there is May 26.
On a roll
They like the atmosphere of the Tuesday Market.
“It’s always festive. It’s so vibrant,” Emily said. “There are kids running around, there’s music. It definitely has that festival feel every week.”
Their first time there, the Langers sold 70 percent of their confections in the first two hours. By the end, they were cleaned out.
“We sold every last thing from our case,” Caleb said. “There was nothing left.”
They had brought a dozen strawberry rhubarb tarts and roughly two dozen of everything else. Last Tuesday they doubled their inventory.
Emily generally spends the two days prior to the market preparing, “if I’m being efficient,” she said. Otherwise, everything — making chocolates, preparing tart fillings and baking everything fresh — gets packed into the 36 hours before the market opens at 1 p.m.
She says she strives to use as many local and organic ingredients as possible. If it can’t be made locally she special orders it from a local provider; she orders organic chocolate in 25 pound quantities from River Valley Mark on King Street.
She makes marshmallow for her s’mores with an organic gelatin which comes from animals that have been raised by organic standards and agave nectar for sweetness. The graham crackers are made from wheat flour from Heritage Grain Conservancy in Colrain.
For the Winter Market, Emily recreated another childhood favorite — the Hostess Cupcake, a chocolate cupcake with a cream filling, decorated with iconic swirls. Sweet Spoken’s version is an intense chocolate cake made with the organic flour and chocolate filled with Emily’s marshmallow, topped with ganache and decorated with marshmallow loops.
The cupcake was a big hit, but it will be on hiatus this summer as she focuses on other treats inspired by the season and other vendors. The season’s heat and sun is a key factor. Chocolate melts.
Sweet Spoken will have a few staples on its week-to-week menu including the s’mores and chocolate chip cookies. Emily says she has finalized a cookie recipe she has spent her career tweaking.
“It’s all in the butter,” she said.
And she will feature fruit tarts, rotating through fresh fruits in a shortbread tart crust.
“For the summer, we are going to be focusing on using the fresh fruit from the Valley,” she said. She has her eye out for local berries.
Last Tuesday’s tarts were a deep red, studded with large pieces of strawberries and rhubarb.
Savoring the moment
When weather allows, Sweet Spoken sells boxed chocolate-covered caramels — perfect squares with edges softened and rounded by dark chocolate, sprinkled with course sea salt crystals. Emily taught herself to make handcrafted caramels after finishing her training at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts in Cambridge in 2008.
Given the high cost of organic ingredients, the Langers say they try to control the prices. The majority of their pastries retail for under $3 each, while boxed chocolates are more expensive at $6 for three caramels or truffles.
“It’s kind of a toss up,” Emily said. “You need to charge enough that you’re covering expenses and hopefully making a little bit of a profit, but we’re trying to keep prices low enough that people can actually afford them. It’s tough.”
Caleb said the prices seem to encourage the customers he has observed to savor the sweets.
“It changes people attitude,” he said. “Where instead of just reaching into a bag of candy and eating it, it’s much more of an experience to eat a single truffle.”
Emily Langer said she thinks people don’t always take the time to appreciate what they are eating and hopes that her confections make the consumer slow down for the moment.
What “I really love about food is the whole experience, the visual, the presentation of it, how you feel when you’re eating it,” she said. “It’s definitely a different mentality than our society has about consuming foods.”