The Danish Presence

Today, the block of Fairfax Avenue south of Olympic Boulevard is known as an Ethiopian neighborhood. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, it was a Jewish neighborhood. But back in the ‘40s, it was Danish.

Hansen’s Bakery opened there in 1947 at 1060 S. Fairfax Ave. Over the years it expanded into the next two storefronts to the south. In 1990, the ever-growing Hansen’s (which by that time had opened branches in Beverly Hills and Tarzana) leapfrogged over an Ethiopian restaurant, the Blue Nile, and took the property on the other side. That address, 1070 S. Fairfax, is the bakery’s business office and showroom.

In the other three storefronts, dozens of employees are baking cakes, trimming sheet cakes into desired shapes (which can be anything the customer can imagine) and frosting round cakes on lazy susans. Cake decorators are working their everyday magic: for instance, creating a rose on a “frosting nail,” snipping it off with a pair of scissors and spotting it on a cake . . . in about five seconds per rose.

Cake-making is in the Hansen family’s blood. Patrick Hansen is a seventh-generation baker, three generations having been bakers to the royal family back in Denmark.

Hansen’s advertises the largest selection of wedding cake designs in California and makes huge numbers of birthday and anniversary cakes for the general public. But it also provides cakes to a lot of restaurants, even restaurants that have pastry departments of their own. They use Hansen’s when more specialized pastry techniques are required.

“The big hotel restaurants call us for special jobs,” says Patrick’s father, Gary Hansen, “because we know all the modern materials--foam core, Styrofoam and so on. A few years ago, a pastry chef came from Harrod’s in London and worked here six months to study with us.

“We do a tremendous amount of movie studio work. We did the [Julie] Nixon wedding. We’ve worked for every president going back to Eisenhower, every California governor, European royalty. We see lots of our cakes in People magazine photos. I just saw one with Bill Clinton. We duplicated the Beverly Hills Hotel for its 100th anniversary.

“But we also do a lot of local business in South-Central,” says Hansen. “We have a price for everybody.”