Photograph by Douglas Rider
Baking Artistry: Sue Toyoshima, owner of Aki's Bakery, sprays on some green food coloring to start decorating one of the many cakes the bakery sells in its Meridian Avenue store. Besides cakes, Aki's Bakery also sells cookies and pastries.
Aki's bakery store pleases customers with guava cake
By Jim Aquino
A fixture in San Jose's Japantown and Willow Glen, Aki's Bakery has specialized in designing cakes for holidays, birthdays, weddings, graduations and other special occasions since 1963.
Aki's sells various cake flavors (as well as cookies and pastries), but its signature item is the guava chiffon cake, which is filled with guava whipped cream and topped with a guava puree by owner Sue Toyoshima and her bakers.
The bakery's website, at www.akisbakery.com, calls the guava cake "a very light and refreshing dessert." It's so popular that the San Francisco Bay Area Hawaiian Food's website (http://pw1.netcom.com/~halkop/food.html) recommends that customers call to order it ahead of time to avoid coming home without a guava cake.
Sue and her now-retired baker husband, Aki, first opened the bakery on Jackson Street in June 1963 after running a doughnut and coffee shop for three years. Sue recalls teaching herself how to bake.
"I didn't know anything about bakeries. It was through trial and error. The salesmen were the ones who helped us get started," Sue says.
The only bakery in Japantown, the original Aki's offered all-American items.
"There were no Japanese pastries at all. We were mainly cakes, pies, cookies and bread," Sue says.
In March 1972, the Toyoshimas opened a second Aki's about a mile away from their house in Willow Glen. Sue says they opened this other location because the original bakery was too small and they needed a building with more space.
In 1998, the family closed the original Aki's to concentrate on running the Willow Glen bakery only. Sue further lightened the workload for herself and her son, Randy, and daughter, Penny, who also work at Aki's, by having the bakery closed two days a week instead of one.
"It got to be too much for us. I'm not getting younger. It got to the point where I thought it was better that the kids should have a life also and not work six days a week," Sue says.
Last year, the Toyoshimas launched the bakery's website. Sue says she is amazed about how the site has introduced new customers to the bakery, especially customers outside San Jose, though Aki's was attracting customers from other cities long before they started the site.
"I know we get calls from Sacramento. The Japanese community there knows who we are," she says.
Sue says word-of-mouth at customers' parties is what keeps Aki's going.
"We still get calls where we're telling people how to get here. They come from all over. We keep on getting new customers all the time," Sue says. "That's how we run our business: word-of-mouth. That's the best way."
Aki's Bakery, 355 Meridian Ave. Open Tuesday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday, 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Closed Sunday and Monday. For more information, call 408.287.5404 or visit http://www.akisbakery.com.
Willow Glen, California Since 1992
