Cakey hands and happy hearts: How these immigrants are building a small baking empire

Tucked away in a strip mall, Anna Paytyan decorates a multi-layer blueberry cake.

She delicately smoothes the icing onto the sides and effortlessly pipes balloon-like shapes on top. 

Armed with her mother's Armenian recipes and her own wit, Paytyan is one of the owners of Cakey Hand, a small bakery in Paradise, N.L., with a mighty reputation. 

Her husband and business partner, Suren Margaryan, watches from the other side of the industrial kitchen. 

The name Cakey Hand, he explains, has two meanings. 

"It's either a hand that makes cakes or is just a cakey hand. Like a kid puts his hand into a cake and it all becomes cake. That's the second interpretation. Different people interpret it differently," he says, smiling.

It's a far cry from their life in Armenia, but Margaryan and Paytyan call Newfoundland home now. Paytyan, the full-time baker, says she never would have imagined the life they've made here.

The bakery started at the St. John's Farmers' Market in October 2019 — an incubator for their brick and mortar store, which opened in 2022, and a gateway to the new location opening this week on Stavanger Drive. 

In 2017, Margaryan left his life as a lawyer in Armenia to pursue a degree at Memorial University.

A year later, he returned home to marry his girlfriend. 

Paytyan says they did everything backward: he came home, they got married, then they had an engagement party. And in November 2018, they came to Canada to start a life together. 

"It was pretty hard, I would say, because I've never been away from my family before and especially from my mom," Paytyan says. "But I knew that Suran is my soulmate and we will have a great life together." 

When she got to Newfoundland, she worked at Sobeys. The job, she says, got her used to customer service and helped improve her English. 

But her husband kept encouraging her to bake.