They met working restaurants in Vail. Now they’re opening a new bakery in Avon

Nine years ago, Angela and Tim Sikora met while working at Terra Bistro in Vail. He was a sous chef, and she, in her second-ever week in Vail, on a J1 visa from Moldova and not yet fluent in English, was hired to make salads.

Nine years later, they are married with a young son, and are about to open a brick-and-mortar storefront for their extremely successful pastry business, Dang Sweets.

“That’s the thing about Vail, people stay close with each other,” Tim said.

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How things came together

Dang Sweets first came to fruition during the COVID-19 pandemic. Tim was working full-time as a chef, and Angela, who had been working as a server pre-COVID, was at home “practicing baking, just kind of having fun playing,” Tim said.

“I always liked to bake, so it started just like a hobby,” Angela said.

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“What started as a hobby grew, and kept growing,” Tim said.

After just a couple weeks of baking cakes and pastries at home for friends, she started getting really good at it, Tim said. They made an LLC and an Instagram page, expecting to receive online orders.

“We never thought it would bring us to our own bakery,” Angela said.

The demand for their cakes and pastries just kept growing. They opened a booth in the Vail Farmers’ Market, and took orders for commissioned cakes for weddings and other events.

In 2021, Luc Meyer, one of Vail’s early restauranters, donated Angela and Tim’s services to the Jack’s Place Hike, Wine & Dine fundraiser. It was their first big event, and the pair stayed up until 4 a.m. making 450 eclairs. The event was a smashing success, and they have donated their services every year since.

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Following the event, they realized they needed to start using a commissary kitchen. The owners of La Nonna Ristorante in Vail offered the use of their kitchen in the mornings.

“Once we found the commissary, it grew a lot,” Tim said.

Both Tim and Angela were still working full-time outside of their baking business. Tim was the sous chef at Matsuhisa, and teaching an outreach program through Colorado Mountain College for high school students, and Angela was working as a hostess at Matsuhisa.

“The second year (at Vail) Farmers’ Market, I think we were sold out all but one day. And usually we were sold out by about 1:30 in the afternoon,” Tim said.

By July 4 that year, they realized that a commissary kitchen could not accommodate the volume of pastries and cakes they were asked to produce, so they started looking for a retail location to call their own.

Finding a baking-specific kitchen was essential for them, Tim said, because baked goods can sometimes pick up the flavors of savory cuisine. Smokiness from a barbeque smoker, for example, can be detectable in buttercream frosting.

Last December, the couple had their first child, Teo. “I realized (working at) Matsu(hisa), six nights a week, for about 60 hours a week, I was never going to be home,” Tim said.

To spend more time as a family, the couple decided to “make the jump with the baking, and see what happens,” Tim said.

Wherever Angela and Tim go, their son is always by their side. He has been to fundraisers and dinners, and was a weekly staple at the Vail Farmers’ Market last summer, often strapped to their chests as they worked.

“Last summer, all we did was bake,” Tim said.

Sometimes, Angela said, they would turn out six cakes in a day.

After a year-and-a-half, they found their space in Avon. The space used to be a cycling studio, and they launched a full remodeling effort. Now, the bakery has state-of-the-art all-electric appliances, including ovens imported from Germany, a large pastry case, and plenty of comfortable and inviting seating.

“We want to create more of that living room feel,” Tim said.

“We want more of a place where people can gather together (and) hang out without being rushed,” Angela said.

Tim and Angela will both be working full-time at Dang Sweets, and the bakery will have a “family feel,” Tim said. 

“We’re very hands-on,” Tim said. “We’re going to be here to make sure the quality is where we need it to be, and the standards,” he said. 

“If you’re here, you’ll see us,” Tim said.

“And you’ll see our one-year-old,” Angela said.

A European taste and feel

Their baking style, Tim said, is “a little bit European, a little bit on the French side, and a little bit progressive,” he said.

Angela is from Moldova, and they return almost yearly to Europe to see her family and travel. In Europe, she said, there are many places where people can go to buy a small pastry and catch up, an experience that is difficult to find in the United States.

That is the ambiance they are trying to cultivate in the Dang Sweets storefront. They’re planning to offer light lunch fare, but focusing on providing quality pastries and cakes and ready-to-go options, “keeping that European feel,” Tim said.

“That whole drive of a European-style cuisine of pastry, coffee, have a seat, hang out, talk with friends — people understand it here,” he said.

Pastry options will include eclairs, tarts, cakes by the slice, and macarons — they used to sell over 100 every Sunday at the Vail Farmers’ Market — and the pastry case will also likely see constant innovation.

“We both have that creative side of menu development and recipes,” Tim said.

“I love sweets,” Angela said, so she tries flavor combinations that she finds interesting, and works on the recipes until she has perfected them.

They’re not scared to throw out and restart a batch of pastries if it does not turn out as expected. “We need to learn, we need to give people what they expect and the quality they have grown to know with us,” Tim said.

“We’ll do it until we get it right,” Angela said.

One of their most popular cakes is an Eastern European-style dessert called a honey cake, which has sour cream in the frosting. “It’s not your traditional cake, but it’s probably one of our top three sellers of all cakes,” Tim said.

“We have people ordering it here and then driving to Denver with the cakes,” Angela said.

For special orders, they design recipes to match clients they know well, many of whom place orders year after year. 

For one consistent customer, they recreated a childhood cake his grandmother used to make, using one of the grandmother’s recipe cards.

“It’s fun to get to that nostalgia for people. When you trigger something like that for people, the memory, you feel like you’re doing more than just baking for them,” Tim said. “You might be a 65-year-old person out here on vacation, and now you feel like a little kid at your grandma’s house again,” he said.

Their adaptability has led them to take on baking projects to accommodate for allergies. They have made macarons without nuts and done vegan and gluten-free weddings and birthdays.

“A lot of people have a lot of stress going on,” Tim said. “Having a piece of cake or some cookies shouldn’t be one of those things,” he said.

While the couple loves to travel, and considered leaving Vail at the beginning of their relationship, since their wedding in 2016 they have committed to calling this place home.

“Everyone comes together when stuff happens out here, and it’s nice to see it,” he said.

“We’re fortunate to have found our little niche in this community that hopefully we can grow into something that we can have here for a long time,” Tim said.

The Dang Sweets storefront will be open soon, but they don’t have a set date yet, and don’t plan to have a grand opening. “We don’t want to rush to get open and then serve something that’s not to our quality,” Tim said. “We want to make sure our food comes first.”

Dang Sweets is located at 101 Fawcett Rd. in Avon. The shop’s tentative hours will be Tuesday through Saturday, 9 a.m. through 4 p.m., with an earlier closing time on Saturdays.