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About Us
Once upon a time there was a girl with a dream. Ok, really there was a girl with a restricted diet who was tired of eating foods that tasted "healthy." And that girl is me! (Claire Fitts, the owner and founder of Butterfly Bakery of Vermont). When I was 14 I decided to stop eating refined sugar to lose weight, but ended up discovering that I have reactive hypoglycemia (the symptoms of which went away when I stopped eating the refined sugars -- yay!).
Even before that diagnosis, my mom used to feed me all sorts of "healthy" sweets. There were the carob cookies (I apologize to everyone who liked the stuff, but in my opinion carob is evil), and the artificially sweetened candies (which had *ahem* laxative effects), and a multitude of things sweetened with fruit juice concentrates. When I learned that I could never again escape to the powdered mini doughnuts from the gas station, I decided that something needed to change. I took matters into my own hands and started baking.
Some of those early experiments worked and some needed to be disposed of in the neighbor's trash. I really started to learn how to bake for folks with restricted diets when I became a bread maker and then dessert maker at my dining co-op at Oberlin College (go Fairkid!). I even learned enough to start teaching alternative baking classes there.
About a year and a half after moving to Vermont I created Butterfly Bakery of Vermont to make yummy things for people like me who can't (or don't want to) eat all the super-processed sweets available from the supermarkets. In the beginning I rented Coffee Corner in downtown Montpelier in the middle of the night. A couple nights a week I would bake in two uneven conventional ovens from 5pm to 5am. And the next day I would deliver it. It was a little exhausting. So after about 6 months of that I moved my operation and started renting a bone fide bakery during the day. That was much better.
But even that wasn't quite right and I finally grew out of that space and made my own bakery! That was lots better. That's where we're baking these days. Butterfly Bakery of Vermont is at 87 Barre St in Montpelier. We're a little hard to find (even though our front door is visible from the street), but feel free to stop by and see the operation. We have a tiny retail area, and you can place a special order or just say hi!
THE END
(ok not really, but it is the end of the story written on this website. I'm sure things are going to keep going in real life).
Even before that diagnosis, my mom used to feed me all sorts of "healthy" sweets. There were the carob cookies (I apologize to everyone who liked the stuff, but in my opinion carob is evil), and the artificially sweetened candies (which had *ahem* laxative effects), and a multitude of things sweetened with fruit juice concentrates. When I learned that I could never again escape to the powdered mini doughnuts from the gas station, I decided that something needed to change. I took matters into my own hands and started baking.
Some of those early experiments worked and some needed to be disposed of in the neighbor's trash. I really started to learn how to bake for folks with restricted diets when I became a bread maker and then dessert maker at my dining co-op at Oberlin College (go Fairkid!). I even learned enough to start teaching alternative baking classes there.
About a year and a half after moving to Vermont I created Butterfly Bakery of Vermont to make yummy things for people like me who can't (or don't want to) eat all the super-processed sweets available from the supermarkets. In the beginning I rented Coffee Corner in downtown Montpelier in the middle of the night. A couple nights a week I would bake in two uneven conventional ovens from 5pm to 5am. And the next day I would deliver it. It was a little exhausting. So after about 6 months of that I moved my operation and started renting a bone fide bakery during the day. That was much better.
But even that wasn't quite right and I finally grew out of that space and made my own bakery! That was lots better. That's where we're baking these days. Butterfly Bakery of Vermont is at 87 Barre St in Montpelier. We're a little hard to find (even though our front door is visible from the street), but feel free to stop by and see the operation. We have a tiny retail area, and you can place a special order or just say hi!
THE END
(ok not really, but it is the end of the story written on this website. I'm sure things are going to keep going in real life).