At eight in the morning on March 15, I open the door to Vanille Patisserie, a few hundred feet south of Parker on Clark Street. My eyes are met with the bright light of the pastry cases. The chocolate-caramel frosted brownies, white chocolate-studded cheesecakes, and colorful macaroons create row-length rainbows. I open the kitchen door to see ballerina bunned and bandana-ed cake decorator Lexi Gibbons checking the week’s deliveries to Vanille’s other two locations at 3243 North Broadway and 131 North Clinton Street.

The Parker community contributes to the consumption of these sweets. In the mornings, Patisserie Operations Manager Leslie McDavid sees Parker students with their tutors, and in the afternoons, students and teachers select their after-school snacks.

“I feel like we definitely get our regular people who go to Parker and come by and stuff like that,” McDavid said. “We love you guys! So we can always take more of you.”

McDavid notes that the proximity of Parker, which is less than a block, makes Vanille an easy access point for Parker students to place orders.

Gibbons and Leslie joke that in the month of March and April, the Patisserie makes flower cookies even though there aren’t any flowers outside. But they believe that these months are a perfect period for experimentation with flavors.

“Right now, we’re working from the wedding cake menu,” Gibbons said. “So last week, we tried a strawberry mousseline cake with white cake. Today, we are trying chocolate cake with nutella mousseline and fresh hazelnuts, a triple chocolate cake, which is chocolate cake, white chocolate mousseline, chocolate buttercream, and a mocha cake, which will be chocolate cake, a layer of coffee mousseline, a layer of chocolate mousseline, and either chocolate buttercream or coffee buttercream.”

If owner Sophie Evanoff likes the flavors, they can be incorporated into special orders for customers. But special orders for customers like Parker students aren’t the first task on Gibbons’s daily agenda. She tackles each day with the same routine, baking the cupcakes and the case cakes, then looking at special orders.

“It’s always nice seeing a cake come to life,” Evanoff said, “once we’re done with it.”

For a blue skyscraper “Happy Birthday!” cake, Gibbons starts with blue fondant. She uses a “push and smush” technique, pushing the fondant with her palms and then smushing it with her fingertips to thin the fondant.  Gibbons said, “Eventually, it becomes muscle memory.”

Once she is done rolling out the fondant and putting it over the cake, she goes through the same process with a black piece of fondant that is half the height of the cake. Then she takes a skyscraper stencil and makes vertical lines to cut out the buildings. Horizontal lines follow. When the fondant is finally on the cake, she pipes a black “Happy birthday!” and the cake is finished.

Gibbons started baking and cooking when she was a child, whether it was making cakes for her parents’ birthdays or italian dinners with her mom. Once she took a cooking class in high school, she realized that she might actually want to pursue a career in the culinary industry. She attended Johnson & Wales University for her Associates Degree in Baking and Pastry Arts and has been a cake decorator at Vanille for six years.

“You know, the name ‘Vanille’ speaks for itself,” Gibbons said. “We use products with quality ingredients. Sometimes, they test the boundaries a little, like trying new flavors. That’s kind of what appealed to me, that it’s this French bakery in Chicago, and it’s very elegant and not cheesy or too cartoony.”

Gibbons leads me over to a front window full of fake cakes. She tells me that the Patisserie calls this window the “Cake Graveyard.” This graveyard consists of inedible, decadent, four- or five-layered cakes that the Patisserie has used to show their techniques and designs to different companies or bridal shows.

“We have a production list of things that need to be done this week,” Gibbons said. “People usually do their own things, but sometimes we have tag teams, like, ‘Hey, I’m making this–do you want me to make this too?  Let’s do this together.’”

McDavid laughs over a period the Patisserie remembers as the “Dark Ages.”  The Patisserie did a project where the staff had to fill and make around one million hot pink macaroons.

“It was at a time where we had to stop everything we were doing to help fill macarons,” McDavid said. “And there were these bright pink shells, and that’s all you saw everywhere, just everyone filling in macaroons. And I guess it somehow became my fondest memory because it was all of us, we were all together doing it.”

Although the Patisserie staff had all hands on deck during this period, during the year, their busiest times are from November to Valentine’s Day, according to McDavid. She jokes that she and the staff have “We’re not going to make it!” moments, but in the end, they all survive.

Behind the kitchen’s closed doors, Gibbons says, production almost quadruples.

“We add a lot of new product that we don’t offer on a daily basis like chocolate bars or different miniature cakes and stud muffins and macaroon flavors, and stuff like that,” Gibbons said. “For stuff that are available on a daily basis, we might go through 200 and then during the holidays go through 800.”

Junior Grace Andrews, who calls herself a regular at Vanille, is a fan of their Vanille macaron. “I like Vanille because their selection of macaroons changes all the time,” Andrews said, “so you can go there and always get a new flavor.”

11th and 12th grade learning specialist Bridget Walsh, who lives right around the corner from the Patisserie, uses Vanille as a site for tutoring Parker Middle school students in the mornings.  

“Some of the students that I tutor after school have a lot of difficulties during the day, so we meet there in the morning, usually between 7:00 to 7:15 to get some work done,” Walsh said. “I like Vanille in particular because it doesn’t attract a lot of people who use electronics. They don’t offer any wifi there, so it’s like old-fashioned pen and paper study time, and the people are really friendly.”

For Gibbons, seeing orders from regulars like Walsh to new customers who come in intrigued by the “Cake Graveyard” make her enjoy her job every day.