At Elemental Bakery & Coffeehouse in the Clayton neighborhood, head pastry chef Deva Randolph starts her day long before the sun comes up. While she typically gets in around 6 a.m., there are days where she needs to arrive at 2 a.m. to guide the team and prep the flaky, buttery baked goods.
“There’s times where I don’t leave until 8 or 10 o’clock at night,” said Randolph. “If I’m lucky, I get out around sometime between 4 and 6.”
By the time the shop opens at 7 a.m., the case is filled with laminated pastries that range from standard almond croissants to creative creations like blood orange coriander crowns, which recently won the People’s Choice Award at 5280 Pastry Co-Op’s Golden Croissant competition. You’ll also find a variety of cookies, scones, muffins, buns, and loaves of bread that Elemental co-founder and head baker Sani Obhodas (a.k.a. the Bosnian Baker) makes fresh daily.
The Baker’s Background
Randolph grew up in a small town in Southern Illinois called O’Fallon. She remembers watching her dad bake while she stood on a chair at the counter and helped him mix dough.
“I think it was about fifth grade when Cake Boss first aired,” she recalled. “I remember watching it and thinking, ‘Wow, that’s pretty cool. I want to try that.’”
Soon she was making birthday cakes for friends and family, carrying that passion through high school before enrolling in the baking and pastry arts and food service management program at Johnson & Wales University in Denver. What began as a childhood hobby quickly turned into a career.
Her first professional gig was at Mulberries Cake Shop, where she worked for five years before heading to Martha’s Vineyard for three seasons as a head baker.
The Coffeehouse Connection
After years of moving every six months for seasonal work, Randolph was ready for something more permanent. While scrolling social media and keeping an eye on Denver’s growing bakery scene, she came across a page that piqued her interest.
“I was following GetRight’s and saw he tagged the Bosnian Baker on his story,” Randolph recalled. “On the Vineyard, I worked with a ton of Bosnians. A lot of my friends are from Bosnia. So I was like, that’s really cool.”
His page led her to Elemental’s profile, which had posted it was looking to hire a pastry chef. She ended up talking with the team, and found a perfect match.
Since joining the team, Randolph has helped train staff and build out the pastry program from the ground up, while Obhodas continues to lead the bread program.
Deva Randolph’s Baking Philosophy
Randolph has instilled a clear set of values in Elemental’s pastry kitchen that includes embracing whole grains, seasonal cooking, and minimizing food waste.
“You’re never going to see a cookie or a scone or a muffin that doesn’t have some sort of different grain in it,” Randolph explained. “It’s never going to just be all-purpose flour.”
While Elemental’s croissant dough remains more traditional, nearly everything else gets the whole-grain treatment. For instance, current offerings include a banana muffin made with spelt that’s milled in-house, a rye brown butter chocolate chip cookie, and scones made with Rouge de Bordeaux wheat from Dry Storage. While Randolph resists naming a single “signature” pastry, her pistachio croissant is a long-perfected staple.
Minimizing waste is equally important to Randolph, a value she picked up from a colleague while working at Evergreen Bread Lounge, and reinforced while staging at the now-closed Silo in London, which was known as the world’s first zero-waste restaurant.
“A lot of our products actually use some of our scraps,” Randolph shared. “We never throw away croissant dough, it always gets reused and made into another product. We try to save some of our scrap peels and turn them into syrups. Things like that.”
She also shops local farmers markets weekly when possible, pulling in seasonal produce to guide flavor profiles.
“I just like to have fun,” she added. “Play with flavors and shapes and really go with the seasons.”
The Takeover
During the takeover on Thursday, March 5, followers will get a behind the scenes look at Randolph’s typical day in the life as a baker. Living in Littleton means a commute before dawn, and she’ll arrive at Elemental around 6 a.m. The pastry team will have already been baking since 2 a.m., and she’ll dive in to help them shape loaves, laminate croissants, and rotate through the day’s pastry needs.
Make sure you’re following DiningOut Denver and Elemental Bakery & Coffeehouse on Instagram, and comment on the post for the chance to win a $50 gift card to the cafe. Tag your friends too, you get extra entries for every non-follower you tag.
Elemental Bakery & Coffeehouse opens daily from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. 3875 Steele St., Suite 1143 in the York Street Yard, elementalbakeryandcoffee.com
