A cake rises again - doughnuts, too - in Swampoodle

The first customer at Cakes by Denise in Swampoodle plopped her baby boy on the brand-new counter above the sticky buns about 7:30 a.m. Tuesday and belted out words she hadn't been able to say in 14 months.

"Two vanilla pound cakes and a strawberry shortcake," Cassandra Clay, 39, told the women in yellow T-shirts buzzing about behind the counter.

Denise's, a North Philly institution on the 2900 block of North 22nd Street, had been closed since a fire burned through the building in March 2015.

Since then, all the customers clamoring to get inside Tuesday morning, like Clay, had been in a self-induced sweets deprivation, waiting and hoping for this day to come.

"I haven't eaten nothing from nowhere else," Clay said, her face dead-serious.

Clay was in line at 6:30, and by the time her order was taken, patrons stretched out the door, past Pacific Fish & Seafood and a mobile-phone store. People in line were looking at their watches and missing meetings, and others were taking orders for people elsewhere.

"Yes, I am in line at Denise's right now!" one woman yelled into her phone. "I kid you not."

A security guard stood watch inside the bakery around 7:20, but after State Rep. Dwight Evans slipped through early, it seemed momentarily that the whole system had collapsed like a Bundt cake with too much moisture.

"Don't let anyone in," owner Denise Gause ordered. "Oh, that's Dwight. Sorry, I don't have my glasses on."

Evans, who recently defeated Rep. Chaka Fattah in the Second Congressional District primary, was ordering sweet potato pie and pound cake, overjoyed that Gause was back and bustling.

"This is the kind of place that makes a whole block thrive," Evans said.

Moments later, Clay and all the other customers were let in - and the orders were coming in hot. Employees twirled around one another, folding cake boxes and dipping under trays of hot Danish.

"If you cut nuts with that knife, don't use that knife for anything else," Gause instructed her crew.

Back by the ovens, a 50-pound slab of butter had slimmed to about 38 pounds.

"The secret," baker Preston Burman, 46, said about his doughnuts, "is love."

The fire destroyed Denise's just before Easter last year, Gause said, but she vowed to come back, and Tuesday morning was busier than Day One in 1990, when she turned a lifelong hobby into a business.

"My sister and I like to say we put pudding in the cake before Betty Crocker did," said Gause, 63. "We bake the way people remember their mothers and grandmothers baked. We use fresh ingredients. Everything is made in-house."

New cash registers were having trouble keeping up with demand Tuesday, and the line only grew.

"I've got cash money in my hand," Thomas Raynor, 59, said as he waited for pastries.

Outside, around 9 a.m., people an hour's distance from the cash register didn't seem to mind. They said Gause and her cakes were part of their lives. Every birthday, graduation, and anniversary was marked by one of her cakes.

Sometimes, one or two customers said, the wedding cakes were more memorable than the grooms.

"My kids don't know any other birthday cakes," said Shonte Griffin, 35, of North Philly. "I'm getting a cake for my sister's baby shower and I'll get cakes for that baby and so on. I'll wait all day."

narkj@phillynews.com

215-854-5916 @jasonnark