Ozzie Bakes opens on Square

For the last seven years, Sue Roberts has parlayed her love of crafting sweet pastries into a successful south-central Kansas business known as Ozzie Bakes, the name reflecting her Australian heritage.

This summer, however, Roberts and her husband, Jason, moved the business to Holton, and after a month or so of getting the business’ new home on the south side of Holton’s Town Square ready, the Roberts opened for business on Sept. 17.

“Cheesecake is a big thing, in lots of different forms — cheesecake bars, cheesecakes in jars, cheesecake croissants,” Roberts said of what she considers her specialty. “And I do like combination cheesecake pies. For example, a lemon meringue pie becomes a lemon meringue cheesecake.”

Visitors to Ozzie Bakes will also be able to sample a variety of pies, pastries, sweet breads, danishes and, true to her native Australia, “matchsticks” — a classic Down Under dessert made from baked puff pastry rectangles and filled with jam and whipped cream, which some of her customers who are also native Australians now living in the Topeka area would drive hours to buy.

No doughnuts, however.

“A lot of people come in and go, ‘Are you going to have doughnuts, or are you going to have bread?’ No to both,” Roberts said, then added, “I may from time to time do some cake doughnuts, but I didn’t really want to do deep fry… You need a fire trap-type thing installed for doing deep fry, and I didn’t want to install that.”

Roberts grew up in the South Australia capital city of Adelaide, where she learned baking from her family, especially her mother — a traditional baker who made “everything from scratch.”

“If I used anything from a packet, she would slap it out of my hands!” Roberts said. “I was always taught to do everything from scratch. And my father was an engineer, but he loved to cook. So I got the best of both worlds. He was extremely good at cooking, and my mother was extremely good at baking… It was always a passion throughout the family.”

Sue and Jason met 17 years ago and kept up a “long-distance relationship” through the years, but found it hard to leave her family and home country even though they wanted to be together.

“The best way for me to get into America at that time was to come here on a business visa,” she said. “I have a business background, so my qualifications are in marketing. I got a degree in that, and I used to consult other businesses. But I thought, you know what? It’s time to finally open a bakery.”

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