Wolf’s Bakery’s lemon fluff cake a Southland delicacy for nearly 80 years
If cumulus clouds were baked into a cake somewhere over Italy’s citrus-friendly Amalfi Coast, the result might come close to the lemon fluff at
“It’s a really airy lemon chiffon cake with a special icing that’s not as light as whipped cream but not as heavy as buttercream — kind of right in the middle,” said Joe Boehm, head baker at the Evergreen Park shop. “It has a great flavor.”
And it’s been the bakery’s top-selling cake for years. And years.
Wolf’s sells about 300 of the cakes a week, he said.
“On Mother’s Day, my Lord, we probably did 500,” Boehm said. “It’s a big percentage of what we sell.”
Owner Pam Lyon said lemon fluff is the bakery’s most popular cake, followed by the atomic cake and Wolf’s version of the Dressels cake.
Lyon speculates people have been buying the fluff for nearly 80 years for several reasons.
“It’s not tart. It’s a sponge cake, so it’s always moist. It never dries out,” she said. “And the frosting is to die for.
“A lot of people don’t like lemon, and yet they seem to like this.”
Lyon admits she’s a chocolate person but still loves the lemon fluff.
“When we first started here my husband and I brought it to every party. We had it every week at our house. The kids grew up on it,” she said.
Other bakeries, she said, have tried to replicate it, and repeat customers have tried other versions, particularly when Wolf’s closes for a couple of weeks in July (July 8-20 this year), but they always come back to fluff.
“They tell us other places have a lemon cake, but not this lemon cake,” she said.
Bud and Laura Wolf opened the bakery in 1939.
Shortly after, Lyon said, Bud Wolf found a recipe for a lemon cake.
“We’re not sure where he found it, but he modified it. And we still bake his version of it at Wolf’s,” said Lyon, who bought the bakery with her late husband, Jeff, 28 years ago.
Boehm, who began working at Wolf’s as a teenager, said years ago companies would send around recipe books and catalogs promoting their products.
“I think maybe the Wolfs found that recipe in one of those books. They tweaked it up and definitely changed the icing,” he said.
“When I got here in 1977, it was huge, ginormous,” he said.
The cake is offered in several sizes and shapes, from mini cupcakes to wedding cakes. The regular-sized cupcakes have a custard filling.
Because the cake is fragile, Boehm said, it can’t be stacked, but separate cakes can be placed on pedestals of different heights to create a tiered wedding celebration look.
“We’ve had many requests for that,” he said.
Wolf’s used to make a lime fluff for Christmas and St. Patrick’s Day, as well as an orange fluff in the fall. But for the last 10 years, Lyon said, customers have preferred the lemon, so now the bakery concentrates on that.
Lyon said while the bakery has a number of regular customers from the neighborhood, many people who’ve moved to other parts of the Chicago area or even other states stop in when visiting the area.
“We have one customer who comes from Woodstock often. Some people come from Homer Glen and from Wisconsin,” she said. “We get lots of people who come in because they are in town, people who grew up in this area.”
“They all say, ‘You need to set up a bakery near me,’ ” Boehm said.
But, Lyon said, “Some neighborhoods aren’t bakery neighborhoods. And now there are baked goods in grocery stores and at Costco and in department stores, that’s been the death knell for street bakeries. There aren’t a lot left.”
Wolf’s, she said, is conveniently located in a bakery neighborhood near residential areas, busy 95th Street and between two hospitals.
“It’s the smell,” Boehm said. “In the morning I can walk along 95th street and just smell baked goods. People are getting up and going to work and this great smell just permeates the neighborhood.”
The smell may bring customers in, Boehm said, but the notion of working long shifts that begin in the middle of the night doesn’t appeal to potential bakers.
“Nowadays a lot of young people don’t want to work 12- to 13-hour days. It’s a lot. It’s a sacrifice,” he said. “So it’s hard to find bakers.”
Will independent store-front bakeries ever flourish again?
“I would have to lean towards no. Not this type of thing, where goods are made from scratch. It would be great if they did, but I doubt it,” he said.
A lot of people go to culinary school to be bakers, Lyon said, but they really just want to make fancy pastries that they can sell for a lot of money.
It’s the older clientele, who visit a few times a week for their coffee cakes, doughnuts and fresh bread, who keep the bakery going, Lyon said.
Ongoing orders for lemon fluff help, as well. To mark the shop’s 80th anniversary, Boehm said, 8-inch decorated Lemon Fluff cakes are now $19.39, reflecting the year the bakery opened.
“We try not to change too much,” Lyon said. “We pretty much have kept things they way they were when Jeff and I started here.”
Wolf’s Bakery is at 3241 W. 95th St., Evergreen Park. For information, call 708-422-7429.
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