Matriarch of Blak’s Bakery dies

Remember Elsie Blak, the matriarch of Blak’s Bakery, in March when you’re enjoying a paczki. Her son Anthony Blak said his mom, who died Saturday at age 91, encouraged her husband to make the Polish jelly doughnuts that have become a Windsor Paczki Day tradition.

“My dad thought it would never fly,” Anthony said Wednesday of the venture that started with about 1,440 paczki in the early 1980s and grew to about 30,000 and lineups at the bakery the day before Lent begins.

Elsie, who also decorated the bakery ’s cakes until she was in her early 80s, died Saturday after being ill for less than a week. Her funeral will be held Thursday.

She was happiest drinking tea and having a conservation. She loved her flower garden. She thought of others and remembered their birthdays with a card. She was devoted to Holy Trinity Catholic Church and was a past-president of the Women’s Catholic League. But the mother of five is probably best known through the bakery that will have been in the Blak family for 100 years this October. She helped with customer service at the bakery, especially on busy Saturdays, and will be missed by longtime patrons.

“A lot of customers come by and they say it won’t be the same anymore,” her son said of how she was being remembered at the Windsor Chapel funeral home visitation. She got the idea to grow the sales of paczki (pronounced POONCHkee) from Hamtramck, Mich., which has a larger Polish population. The Polish bakeries there had Paczki Day instead of Pancake Tuesday, which usually falls in February before Lent. The decadent doughnuts weren’t popular in Windsor back then so Anthony gives his mom credit for helping to extend the passion for paczki to Canada.

Her passion was decorating cakes. She got a rough start on a day in 1953 when the bakery ’s cake decorator wasn’t available. Staff called upstairs where the Blak family lived. She would later say that first cake was awful because the icing became too dark when she added the colouring.

“It was the best that she could do but she thought it was just terrible,” her son said.

She became the bakery ’s primary cake decorator and at one point was adorning 40 to 50 cakes a week with a half dozen wedding cakes on the weekend, he said. “She had a passion for it,” he said, recalling his wedding cake with 20 different layers.

Elsie was born in 1927 in London and her parents moved to Windsor about six months later.

She met her husband Peter, who died in 2015, at a dance in 1948. “My mother loved to polka dance. She loved to be on the dance floor,” Anthony said.

Blak’s Bakery on Langlois Avenue, which will be closed Thursday and Friday, remains in the family. Her daughter Valarie Blak- Gill is president of the bakery and Anthony now runs Tony Blak’s Union Bakery.

Visitation at Windsor Chapel funeral home on Tecumseh Road East is Wednesday at 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. The funeral service is Thursday at 9:15 a.m., leaving the funeral home to Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Parish on Ellis Street for a funeral mass at 10 a.m. Elsie is survived by five children, 12 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.