‘Some kind of alchemy’

A Celtic knot with a striking resemblance to a loaf of challah is stamped into the heat-blasted keystone of Kevin Cosgrove’s 18,000-pound wood-fired oven.

If knots symbolize the thread of life with their intertwined beginnings and endings, Cosgrove is finding himself at both ends these days. After 15 years of making and distributing a dizzying variety of baked goods to Lansing-area restaurants, stores and farmers markets, the founder and principal baker of Stone Circle Bakehouse is talking about retiring sometime soon and handing the business off to someone younger.

Yet he’s also at the top of his game, building on years of enthusiastic word of mouth to draw lines of devoted customers at the Allen and Meridian Township farmers markets each week.

Despite his talk of retirement, Cosgrove still sees himself at the beginning of the rope.

“I’m still getting used to things,” he declared. “Each and every time you touch some dough or experiment with some product, you have a better understanding, and it all piles on.”

Cosgrove’s early career left little room for personal expression. A native of Sioux City, Iowa, he worked in the food and beverage side of the hospitality industry, traveling from one newly opened hotel to the next and staying in each place for a year or two.

He came to Michigan for work and ended up buying a house and starting a family. But his Michigan job showed signs of winding down, and he needed some other way to help his wife support the family.

In classic Irish fashion, he tied the necessity of the moment to a longtime passion: baking.

“I bought some books, started experimenting with some ovens and went to a couple of extended workshops to get a sense of what it really meant, up close and personal,” he said. “I’ve been experimenting since.”

After a year and a half of trying out different products and selling them at select local stores like Foods for Living, he made his first official “bake” under the rubric of Stone Circle Bakehouse on Jan. 8, 2009.

“I took a big leap,” he said. “My wife and I sold our family house and bought an old farmhouse where I put my bakery. It was quite a commitment. We were all in.”

He liked the rustic ring of the name Stone Circle, plucked from a list of archaeological sites in an old Irish travelogue book.

He wasn’t looking for a sign from the heavens to confirm the choice, but he got one anyway.

In his first year with the wood-fired oven, he noticed that each day, the rays of the newly risen sun progressed further along the curved arch of masonry on top.

Precisely on the spring equinox — not one day before or one day after — the inside of the oven was illuminated for five minutes.

Such is the magic of baking. Cosgrove invoked the words of master baker Jeffrey Hamelman, a former instructor at the King Arthur Baking School and author of “Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes.”

“He would talk about the awe you feel when you open up the oven and see those lumps of dough that you put into the oven 40 minutes earlier bloom into these nicely colored, burnished, mahogany-looking loaves,” Cosgrove said. “You know full well that some kind of alchemy, some kind of magic is taking place, and you think, ‘Wow, was I involved with that process in some way?’ Those feelings never go away.”

Bread was a Stone Circle staple from the start, but pastries and desserts came later.

Matt Angell, a New York City pastry school graduate, has worked at Stone Circle for about 10 years.

“Up to then, I hadn’t done a lot of sweet things, but Matt’s done a great job rolling that program out, and people sure like it,” Cosgrove said.

Among the most popular items are chocolate rye cookies, baguettes, galettes (flat, round pastries with an endless variety of toppings), Pugliese (rustic Italian bread that appears to be made of cooled lava from Mount Vesuvius), and croissants with “flavors that aren’t necessarily traditional,” Cosgrove said.

“Focaccia is really what got us into that creative mindset,” he said. “It opens you up to the possibilities of other flavor combinations. Focaccia sets you free.”

Focaccias are also a great way to utilize local fruits and vegetables.

“Right now, we’re working with a lot of rhubarb because there’s a lot of it available,” Cosgrove said. “But as the season goes on, cherries become available, or blueberries or peaches, and that translates into all kinds of pastries, which are just a bunch of fun.”

Cosgrove uses organic ingredients and fresh fruits and vegetables from local sources whenever possible.

Stone Circle baked goods are currently on the shelves at Foods for Living, Hooked, the Capital City Market, Horrocks, the Eastside Lansing Food Co-op, Campbell’s Market Basket in East Lansing, Monticello’s in Haslett and the Allen and Meridian Township farmers markets.

Cosgrove also does wholesale restaurant business with the People’s Kitchen, Capital Prime, Good Bites and Picnic food trucks and several Michigan State University dorms.

Stone Circle products are also a staple of several area community-supported agriculture programs, including Swallowtail Farm in Mason, Titus Farms in Leslie and the Allen Neighborhood Center’s Veggie Box program.

The Stone Circle stand is often the busiest stall at the two farmers markets Cosgrove attends.

“We’ve built up a lot of momentum, but it takes a lot of years of creating relationships with people to get them to come back again and again, so they trust you and what you’re selling,” he said.

Cosgrove admires the Allen Neighborhood Center’s tightly knotted fusion of community and food and loves his Wednesday afternoons at the farmer’s market.

“As bakers, we get locked up in a fairly small, hot space for hours on end,” he said. “All of a sudden, you break out of that, put some products in a basket, take them to the farmer’s market, have conversations with people you’ve grown to know over the years, and it’s like a family. It’s such a kick that people let you participate in their world.”

Cosgrove enjoys gardening and photography, but working long hours from sunup to sundown hasn’t let him get to much of that lately.

“It’s getting close for me to retire,” he mused. “I’d like to try to pass this business on, if it’s possible, and see if I can’t move down the road and leave it in someone’s hands. As far as me, I’m going to go garden and take some pictures and such."