Bang!'s Cissy Olderman Is Back With Bake Sale, a Mother-Daughter Venture

Good news for those missing the comfort-food pleasures of bang!, which closed last year after a nineteen-year run in West Highland: Co-owner Cissy Olderman is back, with a new partner and a new food venture, albeit one on a much smaller scale.

Olderman has joined forces with her ten-year-old daughter, Edie, for Bake Sale, a selection of bang!’s Best of Denver-winning baked-good favorites and other treats that will be for sale on select Sundays at Olderman’s home at 2555 West 36th Avenue, not far from bang!’s old digs. Bang! was all about homestyle food – and Cissy and Edie’s driveway market is as homestyle as it gets.

Olderman got the idea for Bake Sale while reading about the cottage-food bills and zoning amendments passed over the past few years that allow folks to sell produce and prepared foods from their homes after getting a $20 permit. (Cottage-food venders also have to attend a food-prep safety class.) “I think it’s good for people to get their entrepreneurial juices flowing,” Olderman said on a recent Sunday morning, as neighbors and friends strolled up her driveway to peruse the zebra cake, Texas sheet cake and other delicacies she and her daughter had prepared.
For Olderman, who handled the dessert program at bang!, those creative juices never stopped. While she was ready to leave behind the full-time restaurant business (“It was too much to be mom and restaurant partner,” she says), she’s continued to bake up a storm, whipping up dozens of muffins every Saturday morning for her eleven-year-old son Boone’s soccer games. “I bake when I’m stressed,” she says. Clearly the process works, as Olderman is perennially unruffled.

The real instigator behind Bake Sale, though, is Edie, who’s taken after her mother in the kitchen. For Olderman’s last birthday, Edie surprised her with a raspberry layer cake she baked by herself after having watched her mother pull together such creations countless times. Now she’s ready to go public with her culinary skills, and she’s looking forward to the resulting pocket money.

The mother-daughter team will be offering their latest creations starting at 10 a.m. this Sunday, October 30, and if past sales are any indication, the goodies will go fast. After that, they'll set up Bake Sale every few Sundays throughout at the fall and winter; check the Bake Sale Facebook page for the latest info.

The selection is constantly changing, from chocolate-peanut butter bars to blueberry coffee cake to sweet-potato bread, but one option will always be on the menu, in one form or another: Olderman’s celebrated gingerbread. Although these days, she’s not the only one in the family baking the iconic treat.

“It has a lot of ingredients and takes a while to make,” says Edie. But judging from the reaction of those who sampled her gingerbread on a recent Sunday, she’s giving her mom a run for her money.