Eat Cake 4 Breakfast
Well, Mr. Shakespeare, we’re glad you asked. Sometimes there is a call to action in a name. From the very start, a strong and loyal following has abided by the request of a small Brewster bakery to Eat Cake 4 Breakfast...and eat croissants and Danish and scones, quiche, pies, and pastries.
Eat Cake 4 Breakfast is the realized vision of Danielle Nettleton. “It’s just a phrase I’ve always used as a play off of Marie Antoinette,” she says of the former French queen’s infamous alleged utterance. It was a dream that didn’t exactly take hold in Nettleton’s earliest years. When asked when she discovered the art of pastry making, it wasn’t at her mother’s hip in the kitchen. “I made an apple pie in college,” she says with a laugh. “And it came out really good!”
Despite that initial tap of fate, Nettleton took her liberal arts degree from Bucknell and headed west, into the wild and daring world of human resources. It didn’t take long for her to find her way back to the Cape and answering an ad for a “nighttime baker” at Nauset Farms in Orleans. It was while working that 6 pm to 2 am shift that Nettleton found her passion for creating delicious pastries.
Furthering her pastry education, Nettleton enrolled in the famed Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and completed the one-year course in just eight months, but that was only part of her education. “I also interned at a production kitchen that supplied area restaurants with baked goods,” she remembers. It was that experience where she learned the process and the business.
Upon returning home, there were a few career stops, including on Nantucket and at PB Boulangerie in Wellfleet. By the summer of 2015, Nettleton had set about finding an establishment of her own. “My original plan was to open a wholesale facility to supply area restaurants,” she recalls. When the space at 302 Underpass Road in Brewster became available, she knew it was the place. She also knew that the shuttered former deli would be a retail location.
“It just lent itself to retail,” Nettleton says. After a three-month complete renovation helmed by her father, Tom, Nettleton threw open the doors in September 2015 and hasn’t stopped since. “I was thinking, ‘A nice, soft opening for the fall’ and it has been gangbusters from the start!” she exclaims.
The local clientele can’t get enough of Nettleton’s creations, and there are many from which to choose. A dozen breakfast items like croissants, Danish, and scones. There are eight to twelve pastries, cakes and tarts on any given day, as well as five different types of cookies and a couple of quiches, all baked or finished fresh daily.
The headliner for Nettleton is the Brewster Bun. “People can get aggressive with those,” she chuckles, referring to the most popular offering at Eat Cake 4 Breakfast. A lighter and more buttery version of a dirt bomb muffin, the Brewster Bun is wrapped croissant dough covered with cinnamon and sugar, with an ingredient inside of which Nettleton will only say, “That’s my secret.” It makes the Brewster Bun nothing short of amazing. One bite and you can see why people might get testy when told they’re sold out.
The beautiful cakes, tarts and desserts are all expertly crafted to look as wonderful as they taste. The opera cake is a traditional sevenlayer French cake made with Cape Cod Coffee Roasters’ Vienna Roast. “It was the first perfect score I received at Le Cordon Bleu,” Nettleton proudly states.
If gluten is not your friend, Eat Cake 4 Breakfast has you covered with the cheesecake (Nettleton’s mom’s recipe), the traditional passionata and opera cakes, and desserts like the pot au caramel, Greek yogurt panna cotta, and coconut macaroon cookies.
Located a few pedal pumps off the Cape Cod Rail Trail bike path, Eat Cake 4 Breakfast will be a tasty way station for those bikers looking to refuel this summer, and Nettleton will be ready. She’ll be ramping up staff and production to be open six days a week from 7 am to 2 pm (closed Mondays) as the word of mouth and crumb-flaked grins continue to spread.
No matter what you choose to eat for breakfast (or lunch for that matter), your day couldn’t get much better than when you Eat Cake 4 Breakfast.
Eat Cake 4 Breakfast
302 Underpass Road, Brewster
508-896-4444
Open Tuesday-Sunday, 7 am-2 pm
