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Wards Pastry
730 Asbury Ave.
Ocean City
399-1260
Hours: 7 a.m. to
6 p.m. Monday through Friday; 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays,
7 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Sundays.
Customer favorites: Butter cookies of all varieties. In the
summer, Wards will sell about 400 to 500 pounds of them a
week. At 60 to 70 cookies per pound, that’s 35,000 cookies a
week. This time of year, those numbers double. Cakes—the
layer and birthday cakes are the same recipe Grandpop Hohman
used--make up half the bakery’s revenues, and the sticky
buns and fried sticky buns, along with the homemade
doughnuts, are the traditional sales leaders.
So you think you’ll do a lot of baking this holiday?
OCEAN CITY -- We had a columnist complain in print last week
about how many things she has to do in a cleverly written,
tongue-in-cheek diatribe about the holiday season and all
the stress it brings.
Mostly, she wrote, she’s giving up baking cookies.
I’d like to introduce her to baker Walt Hohman, owner of
Wards Pastry in Ocean City.
Cape Cuisine: How many hours a week are you putting in these
days?
Walt Hohman: About 70, give or take a few.
CC: Let’s use the butter cookies as an example. What is the
volume like compared to the busiest part of summer?
WH: We’ll do the same between now and Christmas as we do in
the month of August, but now we have half the crew doing it.
CC: And how much is that?
WH: About 3,000 pounds.
CC: I have no idea what that means. How many cookies per
pound?
WH: Average is about 65.
Let me do the math for you. 3,000 multiplied by 65 is
195,000 cookies.
Still feeling overwhelmed?
And this isn’t nearly the volume it used to be, but Hohman
is making due. In 1941, when Grandpop Hohman bought the
business from the Ward family. There would be days he’d have
to lock the doors to maintain order as a line formed down
the street waiting for their chance to order.
“I remember as a kid what we used to do volume wise and we
don’t do anywhere near that now. It’s probably about half
from when I was a kid,” said Hohman, who started working at
the bakery when he was 12 years old. “There wasn’t any
competition back then. You didn’t have a Superfresh with an
in-store bakery, you didn’t have Dunkin’ Donuts, Wawa didn’t
have fresh baked goods, and there were no other bakeries
around.”
So they’ve adjusted and adapted, and they’ve even brought
back a piece of the past.
On top of those 3,000 pounds of butter cookies, Wards will
also bang out about 90 customized gingerbread houses.
“And they take three days to build and decorate each house,”
said Hohman, a Seaville resident.
Another thing he’s brought back from the past is something
most people wish was never invented.
“Yes, the dreaded fruitcake is back. Actually, the one we
make is really pretty good. It’s not like the old mail-order
fruitcakes that were (regifted) from person to person,”
Hohman said. “We make an old-fashioned dark cake that tastes
good. It’s definitely not a doorstop like it used to be. We
make it with 80 percent fruit -- raisins, cherries, nuts,
pineapples -- then we have a real dense cake that is
flavored – not soaked – with dark rum.”
Ironically, the fruitcake is almost taking Hohman back to
his youth – almost.
“The last two or three years, it’s really become pretty
popular,” he said. “I mean we’re not doing what we did in
the ’50s and ’60s, but we’re doing a respectable number, and
we do ship a lot of them too, right along with our cookies.”
The fruitcake resurgence, the increased requests for
gingerbread houses and the burgeoning butter cookie fan base
has left Hohman room for hope. A return, perhaps in some
small part, to the good old days.
“I think people my age remember how good it was as a kid,
and you really can’t get the good stuff elsewhere, so
they’re coming back now,” he said. “Everything seems to be
going that route now, back to tradition, back to traditional
values. There’s nothing really new in the baking industry
right except for that—going backwards—and we never changed,
we’re still there. If anything, things are coming back to us
now, which can only be a good thing.”
Rob Seitzinger can be e-mailed
at seitz[at]catamaranmedia.com or you can comment on this story by
calling 624-8900, ext. 250.
Check out his Cape Cuisine food blog