• Why: Vancouver’s Fairlight Bakery, owned and operated by the Fitzgerald family, doesn’t provide a place to sit down and eat. It focuses solely on selling baked goods, both wholesale and through a retail store, and has done well enough for itself that its customers include schools as far away as Florida.
Since it opened 11 years ago, Fairlight has been committed to buying local ingredients whenever possible. All its items are made from scratch and free of preservatives, artificial ingredients, additives, trans fats and high fructose corn syrup.
The bakery’s specialties are snack bars and cookies. Operations Manager Zach Fitzgerald says among the most popular are the Marionberry Zac O Mega Bar, snickerdoodles, peanut butter cookies and the vanilla frosted cookie. Along with a variety of jumbo cookies and snack bars, it also sells brownies and scones.
• Atmosphere: Fairlight Bakery’s retail shop is in the back corner of a multi-use business center and feels somewhat industrial before you walk through the door. Inside, the shop is tidy and the products are neatly organized and easy to browse.
• What I tried: I sampled a few of the snack bars including the Zac O Mega Bar, a Zac Attack Whole Oats & Apple Bar, and a Zac O B-Bar Breakfast Bar made with whole oats and strawberries. I also tried a chocolate chip cookie, vanilla frosted cookie, a peanut butter cookie and a lemon poppyseed scone.
The appearance of the snack bars reminded me of boxed-cereal bars packaged by large manufacturers. But Fairlight’s bars are far better in terms of texture and flavor. The Zac O Mega Marionberry Bar had a generous amount of seedless marionberry filling that had not soaked into the outer part of the bar. The end result was moist, dense and wholesome tasting. Of the other two bars I tried, I preferred the flavor of the breakfast bar with whole oats and strawberry. Each tasted like its natural ingredients rather than over-the-top-sweet that comes from corn syrup.
Of the cookies I tried, I kept coming back to the peanut butter. It had outstanding qualities that don’t often coexist in a peanut butter cookie. Fitzgerald says peanut butter makes up 20 percent of this cookie’s ingredients. I found this 20 percent to lend indisputable peanut butter character to the cookie. But even with that much peanut butter, the cookie wasn’t greasy or dry, so it didn’t crumble apart. The cookie had just a slight chewiness at the end of every bite.
The vanilla frosted cookie is frosted by hand. It reminded me of a yellow cake with icing.
The scone was deliciously moist, but just a tad crumbly. It contained a light amount of poppy seeds and was drizzled with icing. The flavor brought back childhood memories of my favorite boxed cookie, Lemon Coolers.
My least favorite was the chocolate chip cookie, it had a grainy texture and lacked a rich flavor. But I admit, it’s hard to please me with this type of cookie outside of my own kitchen.
• Other observations: Jumbo cookies and smaller 2-ounce, 1-ounce, and half-ounce sizes can be purchased in bulk by placing special orders. The bakery also has a seconds rack where misshapen or broken cookies are bagged and sold in quantities of eight.
• Cost: Snack bars are $1.50 each or $15 per dozen. Jumbo cookies are $1 each or $12 per dozen.
• Hours: 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday.
• Telephone: 360-573-8597.
• Where: Fairlight’s retail store is 11819 N.E. Highway 99, Suite C, Vancouver.
• Information: http://www.fairlightbakery.com/.
• Health score: The Clark County Health Department won’t score Fairlight’s Highway 99 location until it completes its transformation into a retail outlet. The bakery was last inspected by the Washington Department of Agriculture on March 29 and received a score of 100.
