New Year’s Eve will bring an end to 2024, and it will also mark the end of a baking era in Barrie.
Sigrid’s Cafe and Fine Bakery is closing for good after a four-decade run.
The downtown Barrie shop, owned and operated by the Higgins family, was born out of four generations of European trained bakers, and brought a touch of Europe to central Ontario.
Originally founded by Josef and Sigrid Krautgartner, the Ross Street bakery first opened its doors in November 1983.
The couple left a successful bakery in Germany to start a new life in Canada with their children, Andrea and Ines.
Their daughter, Andrea Higgins, took over in 2004.
“So, my husband’s turning 65 now. I have a few more years, but I guess I’ll join him,” she told BarrieToday after announcing her retirement.
Giving up the bakery is “bittersweet.”
“I’ve been baking for 41 years, and loving it. I’ll miss a lot of my customers very much, but it’s also a new chapter,” she said.
Higgins became a grandmother last year and is looking forward to plenty of family time.
She started her baker training in Germany at the age of 17.
Even before that, Higgins found herself in her family’s bakery when she was just 13.
“Before I went to school, I already had to start at the bakery sometimes before I went,” she said.
Her children, Tim, Patrick and Jessica, also worked in the Barrie business, learning the bakery trade.
She thanks her staff and her husband, Brian, for their love and support over the years.
For Higgins, meeting and dealing with customers has always been a joy.
“I love creating and baking,” she added.
“You’re part of weddings, you’re part of birthday parties, and a lot of people say, ‘My parents brought me here when I was a little baby,’ and now, you know, they’re grown-ups with their own children. So, being part of their life and also the generations that grew up in between ... is phenomenal.”
As far as the baking itself, she enjoys the hands-on work.
“Oh, I like a lot of things, but I think right now I actually like bread the most,” Higgins said.
“There’s something really satisfying to work with dough, because we do everything from scratch. So, it’s really ... an immense feeling to just pound it and to shape it and to get that ready.”
Working with your hands as a baker is one thing, but what about the tasting of your own creations?
“Oh, I eat everything,” Higgins exclaimed.
Quality control is paramount in this business.
“I eat about two sweet pieces a day. I can’t deny that,” Higgins admits. “ ... Especially the ones with alcohol because you’ve always got to make sure the flavour is still there.”
Staying true to her baking roots was always important to her.
“We kept the same recipes, and we’re still baking just the way we always (have), the same ingredients, staying true to your butter and everything else,” Higgins stressed.
With her retirement, a void is now left in the region’s baking world. So, who does she recommend to fill that void?
“I’m still looking, myself, because I know there’s a lot of nice bake shops,” Higgins said.
“We get along with a lot of the other bakeries, and I have never had a chance to try them. So, I can’t really say which one is the best, but I’m sure there is somebody out there, and I hope somebody is out there that still bakes from scratch, but having always been here, I haven’t had the chance to really try it.”
Sigrid’s customers have always come from far and wide to enjoy the fruits of Higgins’s labour.
“I know we had a lot of Europeans in the summertime, and a lot of people come from further away,” she said.
One notable and longtime client, Adrienne Clarkson, governor general of Canada from 1999 to 2005, spent some of her dough on Higgins’s handiwork over the years.
“She always used to come in for a long time, and still comes to this day,” Higgins said.
“Oh, you don’t want to know her words,” she added with a laugh, describing Clarkson’s reaction to her retiring and closing the business. “She was truly upset.”
The former governor general, in a phone call to BarrieToday, lamented the loss of her favourite bakery.
“We are very, very sorry that Sigrid’s is no longer going to be there. It was part of our tradition of going to the cottage on Georgian Bay,” Clarkson said.
She has been a customer since 1994.
Clarkson would often visit Higgins in her bakery to pick up baked goods on the way to the cottage and also on the way home.
“There is nobody that bakes bread like Sigrid’s bakery bakes it,” she said, “and I don’t expect to find anyone to replace her.”
As governor general, Clarkson had a baker in the kitchen of Rideau Hall in Ottawa.
Sigrid’s took in their baker, at the request of Clarkson, for a week’s training to learn from Higgins and her husband the ins and outs of bread making.
“We bought the pans from Germany that they baked them in. They are cast-iron, I think. It makes a difference. It was wonderful and we never had bread as good as that,” she said.
Clarkson said the bakery was clearly a labour of love.
“That’s what you were getting when you went there. You didn’t get just bread, because you can get perfectly adequate bread from machines, but you don’t get that kind of bread except if the people making it think of themselves as real bakers and (are) doing a product that’s different and better than anybody else can do it,” she said.
“We’re really going to miss them.”
Back at Sigrid’s, another longtime customer lamented the community’s loss as she stocked up on baked goods.
“I was looking forward to coming here for years to come,” said Josephine Martensson-Hemsted. “I guess I’ll start baking, because there’s nobody else that has this kind of quality anywhere in the area.”
Sigrid’s Cafe and Fine Bakery closes forever on Dec. 31 at 3 p.m.
