Birmingham Bake & Cook Co.

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1113 Bake and Cook

The store hosts a selection of cooking classes and events each month.

Susan Green walks into Birmingham Bake & Cook Co. daily to make coffee, but that’s where her routine ends.

“The store is like a house,” Green said. “There are walls and furniture and different rooms. Depending on who rings your front door, the vibe in your house changes. Priorities change all the time.”

For the past five years, Green has built a community gathering place based around food.

Gadgets such as a cutting board that doubles as a food scraper hang among whisks and spatulas. Best-selling items like the garlic twist blend in with the pots and pans surrounding them. Cutting-edge Charles Viancin silicone snowflake lids catch shoppers’ attention next to the cash register.

“We are very nuts and bolts,” Green said. “You can see we don’t do a lot of tabletop or serve ware.”

Green also sells the Birmingham 100, featuring products made by businesses within a 100-mile radius of the city, and enough cookie cutters to have become the self-proclaimed cookie-cutter capital of Alabama.

The store’s imports are from all over. She buys from Market in Atlanta and relies heavily on her customers for what she picks out. She said they’re great about letting her know what does and does not work.

“The product mix has changed quite a bit since I opened,” Green said. “Then, I didn’t know what you guys would want. Now I think I have a pretty good handle on what may work.”

The bright and intriguing store moonlights as a classroom, inviting the community in for classes about twice a week.

Past classes have covered everything from cookie decorating to cooking with beer and wine.

Green teaches about half the classes and recruits community members and cookbook authors from as far away as California to teach the rest.

Green is as qualified as any to teach. She attended the Culinary Institute of America in New York and worked for more than two decades with a national restaurant-opening business based in San Francisco.

“I think I am very technique driven, but I think having the proper technique affords me a lot of creativity,” Green said.

It was after 22 years with her San Francisco business that Green was ready for a change that brought her to Birmingham.

“It’s really about being awake, I think, and it was just the right time,” she said. “It was time to do something I’ve never done before.”

Now five years into the venture, she’s as much in love with it as ever.

 “When you think about the pragmatic side of opening a business, you think, ‘Well, I’ll love doing this or that or I’m for this or that,’ ” Green said.

“But you never think, ‘Oh, my God. I love my customers so much.’ That’s just not something you think about, but it’s definitely the best part.”