When Ernest Weil talks about his bar mitzvah in Germany, he doesn’t speak about what Torah portion he chanted or what his speech was about. What stands out about his coming-of-age ceremony is that he baked all the cakes for it himself.

That bar mitzvah boy went on to become the force behind one of San Francisco’s most well-known and beloved bakeries, Fantasia Confections, located in Laurel Village for more than 40 years.

Fantasia closed in 1988, but its Florentines — the bakery’s top-selling chocolate-dipped lace cookies — are still in the hearts of many.

And for those who have fond memories of the goodies that came in the pink metallic box, it’s time to rejoice; the “Love to Bake Pastry Cookbook,” featuring Weil’s recipes, is now available.

If anyone thinks this project was easy, think again. In Fantasia’s heyday, recipes yielded 200 pounds of cookies at a time. Reducing them for use by home cooks was not easy; simply dividing by 200 doesn’t work. It took many years with many volunteer testers (mostly family members) logging many hours in their kitchens.

It was about a six-year and multiperson effort, but finally, the book with a pile of teetering cakes on its cover is completed.

Weil describes his childhood home as a place where two strong odors competed with each other. One made his mouth water; the other didn’t.

He was born in 1924, in Landau, southern Germany. His father was a cattle dealer, so the house often smelled of manure. But his mother was a prolific baker, and the sweet smells of her creations were often wafting through the house.

As a young boy, Weil spent a lot of time in the kitchen with his mother, learning how to duplicate those sweet smells.

Now 82, Weil is still a vibrant presence. His eyes shine brightly as he recalls, in accented English, how he fled Hitler’s Germany, leaving his parents behind to board the infamous St. Louis — the ship that departed for Cuba and then was not allowed to disembark there and was turned back for Europe. Weil’s father died in a concentration camp. Weil ended up in an orphanage in France, obtained a scholarship to the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, and then, at 16, arrived in New York.

Restaurants seemed like the obvious place to find work.

He supported himself through the war’s end this way, and was also able to procure papers to bring his mother to the United States. He requested a day off to go to Washington to meet with a senator who could grant the paperwork to bring over his mother. His boss said no.

Once the foreman of the bakery heard what was happening, he told the boss, “If you don’t let the man go to Washington, we will all walk off the job.”

His mother arrived in America not long after.

Weil’s older brothers had settled in San Francisco, where one of them worked for Koret. When his mother arrived in New York, they too came west. It was 1941. Weil got a number of jobs, including at the legendary Blum’s, near Union Square, where he developed the Coffee Crunch Cake, which he then took with him to Fantasia.

Weil married his childhood sweetheart — another emigrant from Germany — and then was drafted, serving in the army for two years. When he returned, he opened Fantasia in 1948, named after the Disney animated movie, using many of his mother-in-law’s recipes.

In the beginning, Weil worked seven days a week, “28 hours” a day. “Within the first two years, if someone would have come and said ‘I want to buy it,’ I would have said, ‘Goodbye.’ I was burned out. It was very difficult.”

But then, word started to get out.

Yes, the cookies and cakes were extraordinary. But Weil attributes his success to both quality and service — “and most important were the people who worked for me.”

His four daughters often helped out as well, with people accusing him of having so many children just so he would have more help in the family shop. Daughters aside, many of the salespeople and bakers spent their whole careers at Fantasia.

After Fantasia’s reputation began to spread, the business end got to be too much for Weil to handle himself. He wanted to keep his hands in the flour, not the accounting books, so he brought on his brother, Lewis. They then took the bakery to another level, opening a plant in Missouri and providing baked goods for airlines — “first class,” Weil notes.

A blurb on the back of the book notes that when Mayor Dianne Feinstein visited China, she brought Fantasia’s chocolate cable cars to give to dignitaries. When Pope John Paul II visited the United States, TWA fed him Fantasia’s petit fours on a short segment flight. The bakery was also a favorite of Herb Caen, the longtime columnist in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Weil finally had to close the bakery, but then, six years ago, he embarked on the cookbook project. He estimates that it took at least 10,000 hours of people’s time, testing and retesting all the recipes and putting it all together.

“You know how when someone is so dumb, they don’t know what they are doing?” he says with a smile. “I had no idea what I was getting into.”

Though not a religious man, “I always closed the bakery on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur or else my mother would turn over in her grave,” he says. He often made cakes for charity events, and will now donate some proceeds from book sales to “Beit Ruth,” a school in Israel for children with learning disabilities, and to local children’s organizations.

Noting that his hot cross buns and Christmas cakes were just as popular as his hamentashen, he says, “I made my living not just from Jewish people. I need to consider the rest of the world, too.”

These days, though Weil has definitely slowed down, he still loves to bake, and making sweet confections for others still calls him to the kitchen. “I can’t stand too long anymore,” he says. “But when I begin baking, all my problems go away.”




“Love to Bake Pastry Cookbook” by Ernest Weil ($29.95) is available on his Web site, lovetobakecookbook.com and at various Bay Area bakeries. Information: (510) 205-4489.