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Not quite a piece of cake: Running Penn State's bakery

By Andrew McGill

PSU College of Communications


Cindy Dunsmore doesn’t do much baking at home. On Thanksgiving, she isn’t the one making the pies, she says with a laugh.

Sitting in her small office in the Housing and Food Services Building just across the street from Penn State’s campus, it’s easy to see why. As assistant pastry chef and acting manager of the Penn State Bakery, every day is Thanksgiving dinner – a couple hundred times over.

She commands an organization that supplies Penn State and other paying customers with every baked good they could ever desire – not just pies, but cakes, rolls, paninis, croissants and scones. Without her 18-member crew, there would be no hoagies in Redifer, no cookies in West Halls and no brownies for parents to send to homesick students.

And for those who say you need a degree from the Culinary Institute of America to cook, Dunsmore is quick to disagree.

“I don’t have formal training,” she said. “I didn’t go to a culinary school. Mine is mainly work experience.”

And this is no small-time operation: Like many Penn State structures, the Bakery is built to a 40,000-student scale. With a main floor half a football field long and an associated warren of freezers, storage rooms and loading docks, it’s equipped to store, assemble and ship several tons of baked goods a day.

The facility runs Monday through Friday on a breakneck pace, with some workers coming in as early as 3 a.m. The bakers have got airtight deadlines to make – when the trucks leave to deliver to University Park, the Commonwealth Campuses and beyond, the goods had better be on board, Dunsmore said.

That requirement has a special significance today. With one of her fellow managers sick and the other out on maternity leave, Dunsmore is left running the show herself. With special holiday orders piling up – including gingerbread houses, meticulously assembled by hand – she’s running a bit ragged.

“It gets a little hectic,” she said. “That’s why some of the stuff has to be pre-ordered, so we can bake those pieces.”

Indeed, her facility has broken down baking into a precision science. All the required ingredients – flour, yeast, sesame seeds, gumdrops – are bought in bulk and stored in an adjoining warehouse. A whole staff spends all day measuring and parceling ingredients, guided by computer printouts and finely tuned scales.

They’re then wheeled to one of the Bakery’s industrial mixers, barrel-sized centrifuges that can homogenize a mixture in just a few minutes. From there, the dough diverges – to the breadmakers, to the baking tins, to the cookie machine.

This device, one of the Bakery’s most-used tools in Dunsmore’s reckoning, is of particular importance to Penn State students. It’s from here that all of the chocolate chip cookies are dolloped out, pneumatically ratcheted onto waiting trays and frozen until ready to be shipped to the university’s dining halls. At some points, production in the whole bakery is held up while workers wait in line to use the machine, Dunsmore said.

Today, it’s a full court press. While Dunsmore goes over paperwork in her office, student workers are busy cutting holiday cookies out of rolled dough, dropping on toppings and dipping in chocolate sauce. Students are a population the acting head pastry chef has particularly tried to reach out to.

“They’re paying to go to school here, so we’d like to employ them,” she said. “It’s a little more difficult for us to get students, since we’re out of the way – but we have some really good students.”

While her staff may grumble at the beginning of a student hiring cycle, they protest even louder when their new helpers have to leave, she said.

Over at the specialty bakery wing, workers are adding icing to cookies. Dunsmore takes a minute to tell them to simplify their designs – time is of the essence.

The trucks roar away from the loading dock: The 9 a.m. deliveries have been made. It may seem like a thankless task – as soon as one day’s work is done, the next day begins.

But Dunsmore, a 13-year veteran who worked at a family-owned restaurant for years before moving to the Bakery and climbing her way up from a Grade-8 Specialty Baker, finds satisfaction in a job well done.

“I really like working with the customers,” she said. “I like talking to the managers and seeing what we can work together and do – see what they want, see how we can help them.”

Birth of a cookie

Ask any Penn State student what their favorite dining hall treat is, and they'll all agree: the West Halls Chocolate Chip Cookie. Sweet, gooey and lusciously undercooked, they're a classic at Penn State. But most students don't realize exactly what it takes to bring the famous dessert to their plates.

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