One of my many food fantasies is that I’ll someday own a small cafe—just a breakfast and lunch joint where your coffee mug is topped off every three seconds and the food is unpretentious and comforting.  At Mary’s Cafe we’ll do all the baking in house.  There will be homemade bagels slathered in cream cheese, scratch english muffins topped with melting butter and blackberry jam, and piping hot paninis made from homemade focaccia.  For dessert?  Triple chocolate cake, and flourless chocolate cake, and molten chocolate cake topped with chocolate fudge and homemade ice cream…  oh, and maybe a chocolate chip cookie or two.

Granted this fantasy hinges on my baking experience, which consists primarily of baking the cookie recipe on the back of the Nestle chocolate chips bag a thousand times or two.  (I don’t care what people say—it’s ok to use the recipe on the back of the bag.)

Fresh-baked bread is one of the simple pleasures in life.  I consider myself a free-basket-of-bread connoisseur, but I’ve never been behind the scenes at a cafe (or a bakery for that matter).  That is until last month, when I got the opportunity to knead some dough at the Great Harvest Bread Co. in North Charlotte.