A Bakery is Saved

This is a pretty much a by the book save the ______ story. This one is about a bakery owner whose building has been sold out from under her. Her main focus has been to honor her grandmother’s, from whom she inherited the bakery, legacy not to actually grow the business and make a profit. Thus she is averse to change and shies away from any innovation or move forward because it would take the business further from how she remembers it from her childhood with her Grandmother. And of course, she can’t envision the business without the setting. I really have a problem with running a business like it’s some idealized lifestyle rather than a functional contributor to the economy. It’s all too common in Hallmark-land. Grow or Die, as they say.

Anyway, inspired by a new rich client, whose wedding she is going to provide the cake for, she finally gets a fire lit under her and decides to finally do everything she can to make enough money to buy the building from her landlord herself. Also, she falls in love with her client’s brother and his little girl, who, yes, is truly adorable. She actually is successful in making enough money to make an offer on the building. But not before the inevitable flour fight with her new man and the wipe the flour off the nose kiss.

The big existential crisis occurs when her bid is turned down and she finds out that the real estate company who is buying the building is the employer of the new boyfriend. Of course he is innocent, but she won’t give him a chance. She mopes, sulks, and backslides to her unambitious self and gives up despite the efforts of her kooky assistance and her energetic business manager. Desperate, they finally call in the big guns (her mother) who tells her her grandmother would not approve of her trying to preserve the bakery like it was some kind of monument to her. She tells her that when Granny took over the bakery from her mother, she moved the business into a new building and changed and innovated to save the business. The lightbulb finally switches on for our heroine.

It’s a revelation! The finish is a strong one which moved the needle from lackluster to fairly watchable. She demonstrates that she has really changed by letting go of her controlling “only I can do it right” attitude. She lets her assistant decorate the cake (which turned out really hideous in my opinion) for the wedding, buys a new and even better building, makes her two loyal employees partners, makes up with her boyfriend and is his date to the wedding. The director did some editing to take advantage of the talent and appeal of five year old cutie-pie by making her a flower girl at the last minute. Check that wedding scene out carefully.