Success is sweet for these bakeries

Ever since starting a business in middle school selling cookies, chocolate chip cookies remain Evangeline McKilligan's favorite thing to bake. These days, she's making bittersweet chocolate truffles at Canto 6 Bakery & Cafe, which she and her partner , Alex Emmott , opened last July.

On a busy corner in Jamaica Plain, Canto 6 occupies the space previously known as Bread & Butter Baking Company. The women dismantled the old bakery's hulking bread oven, repainted the walls a buttery yellow, brought in espresso drinks and sandwiches, and introduced McKilligan's pastries. The hot chocolate begins with homemade chocolate ganache steamed with milk. Sandwich fillings are well-chosen and well-seasoned. And from the flaky-crisp croissants to the lightly caramelized domes of coconut macaroons, the pastries are precisely made and worth ogling.

With years of food industry experience between them, the couple's biggest challenge to date -- the holiday season -- was a breeze, says Emmott.

On a recent weekday morning, assistant baker Ben Dorn crimps pastry around apple filling for rustic tarts while McKilligan climbs a ladder to the bakery's ceiling-level storage space. Descending with a pair of oven mitts, she pulls a tray of cannele from the oven. The lacquered nuggets, a specialty of France's Bordeaux region, give off a deep, dizzying aroma of cooked-down sugar as McKilligan flips them from their ridged silicone molds. Cannele are cooked at a high temperature for a long time so the outside caramelizes and forms a crust around a light, crepe-like interior.

McKilligan arrived here in 1999, soon after graduation from the Culinary Institute of America, and began working at Clear Flour Bread bakery in Brookline. Co-owner Abe Faber says she is "a particularly engrossed, engaged individual."

As McKilligan presses pieces of dough through a roller to make palmiers and croissants, she explains how laminating the dough with sheets of cold, flattened butter gives palmiers and croissants their rich, flaky finish. McKilligan uses high-fat butter in all her pastries; after labor, the butter is their highest cost, says Emmott.

McKilligan runs the baking operation, Emmott oversees the retail end, managing a small staff, waiting on customers, and creating a captivating daily pastry display. With a psychology degree from McGill University in Montreal, Emmott never envisioned working in food, but she inherited an interest in cooking from her parents. Before opening the bakery, she ran the specialty foods division at Whole Foods in Woburn, which influenced her eye for merchandising and display.

Emmott and McKilligan's mutual food obsession sparked their relationship. They met in 2002 when both were at Clear Flour, after which Emmott returned to her studies at McGill. McKilligan's weekend visits to Montreal "revolved around what bagel place we were going to visit, which ice cream shop, which chocolate shop," she says. Likewise in Boston, where the women say they're constantly checking out places, especially bakeries. " We'll drive to New Hampshire to drink hot chocolate ," says McKilligan.

They spend as much time discussing food. After tossing around potential names for almost a year, the women decided to call their bakery Canto 6, from Dante's "Inferno," where Canto VI describes the circle of hell reserved for gluttons.

"We always thought we'd end up there," says Emmott. -- LEIGH BELANGER