When famed Burnaby bakery Punk Rock Pastries announced it would be officially closing its doors at the beginning of this year, sweet tooths across the city – arguably the whole Lower Mainland – were in mourning.
So loud was the protest that four months after the announcement was made, its owner – baker extraordinaire and two-time Food Network champion Hollie Fraser – made a new announcement that the gothic bakery wouldn’t be closing after all. Instead, it would be reopening, with a new look, a new menu, and a much more relaxed ethos.
The decision to shutter in early January had come after years of battling the mental toll that Fraser says comes with grinding in Vancouver’s unforgiving hospitality industry.
“I had a massive mental breakdown, and I couldn’t do it anymore. I was working 16-hour days. I was pushing myself to the brink,” she explains.
“I was like, ‘I’m done, time to go.’ It was affecting me, it was affecting my family. I just couldn’t do it.”
At the beginning of March, Fraser closed the storefront and shifted the business online, leaving her diligent staff to take over while she returned home to Australia for some much-needed recuperation.
On home soil, Fraser spent time in the kitchen with her pastry chef dad and travelled around the country trying a “whole bunch” of classic Australian bakeries. The nostalgia derived from the classic lamingtons and pies made Fraser realize that closing the bakery “wasn’t an option,” she just needed to adapt.
“I finally found my old self,” she says.
“This bakery has been my whole life. It’s my passion, it’s my dream. It’s everything that I’ve ever wanted out of my career. There were so many people I made happy on a daily basis, but I had to figure out how to make myself smile as well. I had to change things up.”
Rather than shut the beloved business for good, Fraser decided the store would reopen at just three days a week, with limited hours. The store itself would take on an entirely new direction, still selling tongue-in-cheek treats and punk-inspired pastries, but now with a more Antipodean twist. Desserts, but Down Under.
“I wanted to get back to my roots and make Australian products and make all the things that you see in Australian bakeries, which is something you don’t see here at all,” she says.
On the menu? Flaky pies, classic sweet buns and lamingtons, all with a Punk Rock Pastries twist. Australia’s iconic cream-filled, coconut-drenched sponge cakes will be true to form, Fraser promises, only her editions will be “gigantic.”
“I want to introduce my roots to everybody here, to get Canadians to taste some awesome Australian products and make people smile in a different way, but at the same time still be able to look after me, and my mental health,” she says.
Since opening in 2019, Fraser’s risqué goods – spanning everything from 3D body-horror birthday cakes to expletive-laden sugar cookies – have garnered the business legions of fans in both the culinary and music worlds.
Winning the Canada edition of the Food Network’s Big Bake in 2019 and the network’s Halloween Baking Championship in 2023 has landed her a supporter in the form of famed pastry chef and TV star Duff Goldman, for one. Goldman, who she describes as her “hero,” joins the likes of Alice Cooper (who enlisted Fraser to make cookies for his band) and Sum 41 (who were gifted an edible, playable guitar following their induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame earlier this year) as fans of her work.
The fanbase had mushroomed so large that when she announced the impending closure of the bakery in January, “the overwhelming response” of texts, social media messages and emails from disappointed customers was so much to handle she had to shut off her phone.
Those loyal, longtime customers – customers who order birthday cakes for their children year in, year out – will be kept in mind as Fraser pushes her business in its new direction, she promises. The old favourites and Punk Rock Pastries staples will still be in the kitchen, only now they will sit alongside treats from her own childhood, and will be served up, should anyone need it, with more than just a smile.
Fraser says she hopes to offer support to members of the community, from both Burnaby and afar, who may be struggling in the same way she was once.
“If anybody ever wants to come talk to me, I am all ears,” she says.
“I will make them a cup of tea or a coffee. We’ll sit down, have a pastry and chat.”
