If you’re coming with what you can carry, what you’re carrying in your heart is what you left behind.” Elizabeth Kloainĭer, 60, is of Hungarian descent, but was born in Slovenia (then Yugoslavia) after his family fled Hungary while it was a satellite state of the Soviet Union. Large chunks of apple and walnuts are evenly distributed throughout. It’s light, incredibly moist and only slightly sweet. You’d smell it when you walked in, it was a bit of heaven.”Ĭrixa’s apple cake is nearly identical to the one her grandmother made. “The dome would be tipped open, as it was steaming and still warm. “You’d come home from school on one of our wet or foggy Berkeley days, and she’d have an apple cake on her sideboard, just out of the oven, under a cake dome,” Kloain recalled. When she was growing up, her “Babushka” (Russian for grandmother), who lived within walking distance from her family in North Berkeley, was known for her apple cake. A lot of that is the cultural stuff, which is often food.” “If you’re coming with what you can carry, what you’re carrying in your heart is what you left behind. “Food is sometimes all you have left,” she said. Both sets of grandparents came to the United States in the 1920s after World War I. Although she is not an immigrant herself, she feels she was shaped largely by the immigrant experience. Kloain, 55, is of Russian and Armenian ancestry. Crixa’s apple cake is made with the recipe Elizabeth Kloain’s grandmother used. The apple cake recipe is from Elizabeth’s maternal Russian grandmother, Elizabeth Butakov, also from the turn of the century. The Kifli pastries, for example, crescent-shaped and filled with honeyed poppyseeds, are based on a Hungarian recipe (late 1800s to early 1900s) from Der’s mother Luci. And aesthetically, the pastries and cakes evoke another time and place, as well. Dairy, eggs, butter, flour and fresh fruit come from local purveyors, but chocolate and liquor are imported from Europe. Kloian is a stickler for particular staple ingredients, some of which aren’t widely available here, as she wants the flavors to be just so. The couple believes in making desserts from the old country that are less sweet than their American counterparts. Tapping immigrant rootsįrom the beginning, Crixa distinguished itself by modeling a European bakery. ![]() Kloian and Der steadily built a loyal customer base, weathered the pandemic and supply chain woes, and, as they celebrate their 25th anniversary, have begun contemplating what is next for themselves and the bakery. In 2000, it moved to its current location on Adeline Street, coincidentally an old horse stable. ![]() “Crixa,” in the rabbits’ Lapine dialect, means a crossroads of two horse paths.Ĭrixa Cakes first opened its doors as a wholesale bakery in the Fruitvale district of Oakland in 1998. She took the name from the novel Watership Down, which she read while undergoing treatment. Check Crixa’s website for the latest menu. When she recovered more fully than she ever thought she would, she opened Crixa along with her partner in life and business, Zoltan Der.Ĭrixa Cakes: The bakery is open Wednesday to Saturday from 11:30 a.m. “I realized that if I can ever walk normally again, I wanted us to open a bakery,” she said.
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