Angel Espinal opened Confectionaires, a new bakery at 2961 Webster Ave. and Bedford Park Boulevard, on Aug. 11. For Espinal, the bakery — which serves up a wide-ranging menu of fresh baked pastries, cakes, breads and coffee — is a second career of sorts. After nine years in the personal training industry, Espinal found a new passion in the cake-making business.

“What attracted me was the artistry of the pastries,” Espinal said. “I would go into the nice bakeries, Bouchon Bakery, Maison Kayser, Dominique Ansel. It was like they were selling art that you can eat. I always had a little bit of a fascination with that.”

Why the name, “Confectionaires”? A combination of “confections” and “extraordinaire,” a simple play on words that Espinal says “starts rolling off the tongue.”

Confectionaires is one of the newest businesses of a certain echelon to be opened on Webster Avenue and the surrounding areas since they were rezoned at the beginning of the decade. For longtime residents, the bakery is representative of the types of establishments they  have hoped would open in the neighborhood for years now.

“It’s a plus for the neighborhood,” Barbara Stroczer, president of Bedford Mosholu Community Association, said at the group’s Sept. 5 meeting. “We’re always complaining that we don’t have good shopping options here.”

Espinal praised the neighborhood for immediately embracing the new business after being so patient during the long construction process. He chose the location because he believed other neighborhood bakeries were far away enough that he could build a reliable customer base. Already, Espinal said, he has regular customers.

“Everybody who comes in here, the one word they talk about is gentrification,” Espinal said. “I don’t know if that’s what I was aiming for, but that’s what they keep saying. ‘Oh my God, the neighborhood is changing. Look at this.’ But it’s for the better.”

Luis Monilla, a building super who lives around the corner, was walking out of the bakery with a carrot cake on Sept. 5. It was his sixth or seventh time at Confectionaires.

“In the morning you want fresh coffee and croissant,” Monilla said. “I like the croissant. Muffin is good. Nice and fresh.”

Espinal lives just around the corner from Confectionaires. The previous occupant, a kitchen equipment store, sold the property to a developer after the owner retired. Espinal moved in after the developers made only minor renovations. There was no counter or kitchen. He would have to start from scratch.

“I designed the entire place from top to bottom,” Espinal said. “Everything that’s gone in here I’ve designed. Some I got right, some not so much. It’s a work in progress: the entire front from the ceiling with the wavy boards to the wainscoting on the wall and the stonework on the wall.”

Espinal hired a construction company to handle the work that required city permits. Everything else, he did using the skills he learned flipping houses after the 2008 housing market crash.

Espinal enrolled at the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan in 2015 and found that the more he learned, the more he fell in love with baking. After completing the program, Espinal decided to “keep it local” and work an “externship” at a bakery in Parkchester called, “There Should Always Be Cake.”  The baker there, Laury Saldana, was hugely influential to Espinal.

“She is the most amazing cake designer I have ever met,” Espinal said. “I worked with her for a few months and stayed a few months after my externship was done until I started construction over here.”

Espinal plays the guitar and the piano and considers himself to be an “artistic person,” but he never had any formal training before attending culinary school. He takes particular pride in his breads and custom cakes.

Confectionaires is still working on a menu and an online presence, but Espinal encourages customers to come in and peruse the wide selection of pastries. As the seasons change over, Espinal plans to have seasonal treats like pies and fresh-baked specialty breads. He also hopes the bakery will take on a café-like feel, with the couple of tables he set up in the spacious storefront.

“People can come and if they want to open up their laptop or their tablet,” Espinal said, “there’s tables. It’s well lit. We have the open windows, the good air conditioning. Trying to give the neighborhood something a little bit different.”

Confectionaires is open from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., seven days a week.

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Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.