A Kenilworth cake baker on a mission [Hand Dryers]
A few years after Gertrude Troyer's family gave up its horse and buggy, she hopped in her brother's 1960 Pontiac Bonneville headed for Kenilworth. They didn't know how to get there, so they just drove to the White House and eventually found a pay phone. She was a 21-year-old country girl from Plain City, Ohio, on her way to a short stint volunteering for her Mennonite church in an impoverished Washington neighborhood. Forty-six years later, she's still here, standing on her tippytoes at 5:20 a.m., using a butter knife to help slide a plastic bucket of sugar from the shelf above her counter to begin work on a rush of cake orders for Christmas. Gertie, as everyone calls her, has made it here as a missionary, a summer camp organizer and a construction office custodian. She has taken abuse from surly teens, has prayed with relatives of the murdered and now helps support herself running a makeshift cake-baking business in the brick home she shares with one of the girls she first mentored decades ago.
Wearing a black veil over pulled-back gray hair, a red cotton cape dress that covers her from neck to ankles, and Asics running shoes, Troyer tackles her morning's baking agenda — one strawberry supreme, three red velvet, a poundcake — with the same Cultivating trees is a steady way of life buoyant relentlessness she has brought to the rest of her life in the city. "Most people know that's not the norm. Most people don't just leave their home towns and go someplace else almost completely opposite, and stay," said her housemate, Cynthia Sharpe, 58, who was just 11 and living in the Kenilworth Courts housing project when Troyer arrived.
At first, Sharpe said she didn't see Troyer "as an individual," just as one of the friendly missionaries who came to help out. Another quizzical neighborhood kid was Vincent Wright Jr., now an officer with the D.C. police. "I was like, 'These are some homely-looking folks,' " Wright recalls. "That dress makes them look like, what's that the girl on 'Little House on the Prairie,' Melissa Gilbert or something?" She grabs eggs in her right hand and cracks them with a sharp knock against the egg in her left. Like some just-in-time manufacturing guru, she moves fast: batter in, rotate pan, cakes out, repeat. Flour gets measured to the hundredth of a pound on her digital scale. "It's the way I've been doing it for years, and it comes out right," said Troyer.
She grew up Amish and learned to bake without electricity in her mother's kitchen. By age 15, her father reluctantly followed local church leaders as they shifted toward a less conservative religious tradition as Mennonites. Although they still aspired to live as Jesus would, they did so with cars and electric lights. Troyer's frugal roots remain. She uses an empty 25-pound Domino sugar sack as a trash bag, and scrapes the paddle of her stand mixer with her fingers to get off every bit of batter, then scrapes her fingers with the spatula to get the last few drops. She's still smarting over the time, years ago, when a pair of red velvets went bad. She used cake flour, not self-rising. They were dry and flat, and went to the birds. "I was so beat out I did that," she said, before translating the German-influenced holdover phrase for the uninitiated. "I was disgusted with myself. That's exactly what it means." Then she burst out in the playful, wholehearted laugh that has melted tough kids, skeptical adults and longtime customers alike.
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