Commuters who park in the large lot at 115 Lakeside Avenue in Burlington have a new on-the-go breakfast option. Since September 29, the pink-and-cream Polite Crunch Bakery teardrop trailer has been popping up on the eastern perimeter of the lot most weekdays at 6:30 a.m.
Baker-owner Kelsey Hatch offers freshly baked muffins, cake doughnuts and quick breads, such as pumpkin-chocolate chunk and toffee-glazed banana mini loaves, along with chilled cans of Brio Coffeeworks nitro coffee.
Hatch, 28, described herself as an avid hobbyist baker, although she did bake for a year at Burlington’s Monarch & the Milkweed. She left her most recent job as a marketing coordinator in August to become a full-time baking entrepreneur.
“I was ready to see if I could make it into a profession,” Hatch said. “The mobile concept allows me to play around with different audiences. I would love to be parking in other lots, too, and even downtown for late-night desserts.”
She gives credit to her family for many of her recipes, such as her Holly Bar, a fudgy chocolate-chunk brownie created by and named for her mom.
Hatch also loves to experiment. She has added ground juniper berries to carrot cake and frosted it with lime buttercream. “It had some gin-and-tonic vibes going on,” she said. Now she’s working on a lemon poppyseed roll — a hybrid of a cinnamon roll and a lemon poppyseed muffin.
Her business’ name comes from the phrase she once used to describe biting into a baked good that was crunchy outside and soft inside. “I called it a polite crunch,” Hatch said, “and it stuck.”
Find hours and an optional preorder link on Instagram @politecrunchbakery.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Mobile Muffins”
This article appears in Oct 13-19, 2021.
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