If you are going on a winter sports holiday to the Canadian SilverStar in BC, get ready for a Dutch treat! Because this is where you will find genuine Bossche Bollen and tomcats at Bugaboos Bakery Cafe! Brabant baker Frank Berkers settled here 23 years ago to never want to leave! Read here why.
Frank’s eyes twinkle when I ask him how he got here. In his head he makes a trip back in history. To when he was 17 years old and set foot in Canadian land for the first time. “As soon as I got off the plane in Vancouver, I immediately thought: I’m going to live here one day,” he muses. Ultimately, that transition will take another 18 years. ”I have come back many times to look around for the ideal place to settle down. It wasn’t until my 8th trip that I entered Silver Star and knew this was my destination. The nature, the mountains, the lakes, the ideal location between Vancouver and Calgary, the cozy village, the skiing… it was just that. And it still is!”
We visited Frank in SilverStar, take a look!
So Frank exchanged his specialty store in Helmond for a bakery cum cafeteria in SilverStar. As a real Brabo – including the soft g – he of course has Bossche Bollen ( chocolate covered cream puffs ), banana puffs ( banana eclairs ) and tompoezen ( vanilla slices ) on the menu of his own Bugaboos Bakery Cafe, ideally located directly at the brand new gondola DR Schuman Summit Express. But people also come here for its famous morning croissants, a coffee break, a sandwich for lunch and for the apré , because you will even find a beer tap here. “With Dutch beer of course”, he beams, “we have the highest Bavaria tap in the world!”
Is baking easy for you here?
“Now I do, but in the beginning I was just crying in front of the oven: nothing worked. Whatever I tried with all my Dutch recipes, I didn’t bake anything. The problem was of course that you have to deal with the altitude and the air pressure. Fortunately, I came into contact with a baker from the Pyrenees and he gave me some good tips. It worked on a third attempt and now I know exactly how to make my bread and pastries. But the weather still determines the result: when it thunders here, I really don’t have to whip cream because it just doesn’t get stiff!”
The tent runs like a train and now he runs the company with 22 employees. “I always have seasonal staff because after the winter I will be closed for 2 months and after the summer I will also close the tent for 1 month. So my staff is made up of a lot of nationalities and mainly comes from Europe, Australia and New Zealand. All ski lovers of course. With me they work 4 days 10 hours and they have 3 days off. Then you can at least go wild here on the mountains because the temptation is great when you look around you. I get up every morning at 3 a.m. to start baking. When I’m done I try to take a break in the morning to ski for an hour. It is not too big here, but very diverse, the treeskiing is fantastic and that powder snow … well, that is inexplicable, you just have to experience it!”