Eating

Julia's Bakery

220 Indian River Road
Orange, CT
(203) 799-6134
www.juliasbakery.com

Jeffrey Chandler's just come from a morning of prep work and he smells like a doughnut. In 1990, Chandler, president of the bakery, named his new business after his infant daughter. Now in her 20s, Julia still helps her dad with the business that bears her name.

In two decades of existence, Julia's Bakery has secured the title of Advocate Best Bakery 12 times. Chandler credits the regulars for the bakery's success, even through the hard economic times. Some patrons, he says, come in on a weekly (and sometimes even daily) basis to stock up on the homemade baked goods.

It's the staples like the cakes, cookies, pies and doughnuts that get people in, but it's the specials, Chandler says, that guarantee "people a good value when they shop the bakery." In addition to their regular pastries and baked goods, Julia's creates special occasion cakes. For birthdays, bar mitzvahs, weddings and more, they get all kinds of requests, from cars to airplanes to animal-shaped cakes.

The weirdest request? "Some years ago," says Chandler, Julia's took a request for a wedding cake with a fishbowl in the middle, complete with live fish swimming around inside the bowl. "Our cake decorators are pretty good at accommodating," says Chandler. And the cake was vanilla flavored, not fish flavored.

And the baker loves the pastries, too. "I still eat sweets all the time," he says. "I still have a sweet tooth."