At first glance, Maddy’s Bakeshop is tiny. Itty bitty. Almost too small to be a bakery, in fact. The pocket-sized storefront is tucked into the corner space of a strip mall painted an unremarkable blue-gray color on Western Avenue, right where Belltown, Interbay, and Lower Queen Anne collide, aka Nowheresville, and it’d be easy to miss when driving or even walking by. But once you step inside, you become engulfed by Maddy O’Donnell’s world, a dramatic, colorful place where sweet pastries are topped with fistfuls of rainbow sprinkles, stunning white sheet cakes are decorated with big, fresh flowers, and savory croissants are finished off with decorative wooden toothpicks skewered with pepperoncinis or cornichons.
The walls are pink with green and white squiggly lines. The day’s menu is handwritten on a giant roll of butcher paper, stretched out taller than the average man. In one corner, under a large mirrorball (obviously Maddy’s Bakeshop has a mirrorball), there’s a thoughtful selection of gifts and foodie items—Fishwife’s tinned seafood, Flouwer Co’s artisanal crackers dotted with dried flower petals, Maeve chocolate bars, Pistakio pistachio spread. In another, there’s a small coffee station, two serve-yourself dispensers offering Kuma drip coffee and hot water for Miro tea. Just minutes into her tour of the space, owner Maddy O’Donnell makes it clear that Maddy’s Bakeshop will never, ever be a coffeehouse.
“I don’t want to do anything unless I really love it, and I couldn’t hate something more than the thought of me making espresso,” she says with a laugh, as she walks me back to the kitchen. In fact, she didn’t even want a storefront, as cute as it is. “My dream was to have a window. I never was gonna have a front-of-house space, but it’d be dumb not to with this weird little room.”
O’Donnell’s love-it-or-leave-it attitude permeates Maddy’s Bakeshop’s walls. That weird little room is just the tip of the icing berg. Because behind that too-small-to-be-a-bakery bakery is where the real pastry magic happens. The kitchen, which is closed off during business hours, is a 2,500-square-foot space that O’Donnell has designed and outfitted into a full-size, full-time croissant factory.
One room houses several refrigerators (the previous owners removed the walk-in before O’Donnell moved in) filled with local produce, various types of cheeses, and so much butter. In another area, there are three ovens and a proofer. The main event is the big room, with a killer view looking out onto Myrtle Edwards Park on the water, lined with rows of work tables and a sheeter, allowing ample space for rolling and shaping and filling and topping croissants in flavors like sour cream and onion potato, grilled cheese, French onion soup, strawberry crumble, almond funfetti, and jalapeño popper. She could’ve turned that space into a dining area, a coffee shop, or a bakehouse with a view, but she kept it for herself.
The mechanical sheeter is a new addition, she says. Before opening her storefront, she worked in a commissary kitchen and used a Brod and Taylor countertop dough sheeter that had to be cranked by hand—an incredible feat when you consider just how many croissants O’Donnell makes in an average week. Between nearly a dozen wholesale spots, the Ballard Farmers Market on Sundays, and the new bakery (open Friday through Sunday), she estimates she goes through about 180 pounds of butter and about 200 pounds of flour a week. And that’s just for the croissants. Last year, on a busy summer day, she’d easily sell 900 pastries at the Ballard Farmers Market, and these days, she moves anywhere from 1,200 to 1,500 a week.
And yes, she’s loyal to her butter brand, as many croissant makers are. But not in the usual gatekeeping way that often comes with monotone lectures about butterfat and melting point. When I hesitantly ask about her butter preferences, I brace myself for a monologue about trade secrets and blah blah blah… Instead, she immediately says, “I use Darigold!” and shrugs. No big deal. No snobbery. Darigold. Like the kind you buy at QFC when it’s on sale, two for $5 with a loyalty card.
“I don’t like the inconsistency of quality of Plugrà,” she says. “My dream is Kerrygold, but I can’t afford that.” She used Crémerie Classique for years, but found it inconsistent, too, so she tried Darigold, and, she says, “Everyone was like, ‘Your croissants are so much better!’ It has a good price point, it’s local.”
O’Donnell is used to people questioning her methods. People have said a lot of dumb things to her since she started selling pastries via pop-ups in 2022. She’s been given unsolicited business advice and unwanted baking tips. Some have commented on her branding, while others have criticized her presentation. Instead of getting mad, she gets creative.
“Anxiety and rage are what fuel me,” she says. “All of the decisions I make are because someone’s pissed me off. The pink walls—a guy, another vendor, told me once my stuff was too girlie. He said I was alienating a group of people, aka men. So I was like, ‘I’ll show you!’ I got a pink tent. My branding is so much pink because, fuck you.
“Someone told me two weeks ago that my ham and cheese croissant looks stupid because it had a pepper on it, and that it needed to be put inside [the croissant]. I said, ‘Do you work in the food industry?’ And he said, ‘No,’ and I said, ‘Great, so you know it’d get soggy?’ Just shut up! It’s cute! Let a girl live!”
Maddy’s stands out in a city where so many bakeries and coffee shops play it safe. I think of the complaint that Stranger staff writer Julianne Bell made in our 2025 Complaints Issue, that coffee shops specifically have adopted increasingly sterile, cold design, seemingly to not offend potential customers. But the way O’Donnell sees it, trying to please everyone is boring. Being herself—loudly, with sprinkles on twice-baked croissants—feels like a radical act these days.
“I also love making a ‘trashy food’ with the bougiest ingredients,” she says. “Like a jalapeño popper. I do a jalapeño popper croissant, but the jalapeños are from local farms, I’ll use really expensive cream cheese, and my flour is from a local mill. I feel like that’s me—a little trashy, but…”
“Locally sourced trash?” I ask.
She laughs. “I kind of love that!”
Indeed, the ham for her ham and cheese croissant comes from Olsen Farms. She gets berries from Hayton Farms, rhubarb from Sidhu Farms, and works with Collins Family Orchard all the time, she says. The flour comes from Cairnspring. And, of course, the butter from Darigold. Which is a local dairy! People forget!
O’Donnell is “not a bread girlie,” she says, but she recently hired another baker, and the two are plotting out a new menu item for the summer: focaccia sandwiches. She shows me a photo of a cross section of a test bake, and I gasp.
“Oh, shit!”
“Yeah, dude!”
“Are you gonna fill those nooks with pesto?”
“And aioli! I am such a slut for aioli,” she says. “I love a good herby mayo. We’re gonna do a veg [sandwich] that’s super, hyper local—my goal, my dream, is to go to the farmers market in Wallingford on Wednesdays and pick up all the veg and sell it Friday through Sunday so it’s so fresh. And then I’ll also have an Italian [sandwich], an herby, oily, meaty… a really good sandwich.
“I live up the street from here. I wanted to be in this neighborhood,” she adds. And I suddenly feel bad for thinking of the area as Nowheresville. I always assumed this intersection of neighborhoods was a pedestrian dead zone—people were always either going down to the water or up to Lower Queen Anne, circumventing Western Ave entirely. But O’Donnell saw the magic immediately—and she saw how her fun, delicious food could fit right in.
“I think of a lot of ideas at that park,” she says, pointing at Myrtle Edwards. “Sometimes I’ll take a bottle of wine, some cookbooks, and I’ll sit there and think of fun ideas. This is a dream, where I am. We’re going to do sandwiches and wine and beer, so it’s a picnic-y vibe.
“I’m trying so hard to make things that will also bring someone joy,” she says, but acknowledges, “my stuff is definitely not for everyone. It’s leaning in on the femininity of it all, because I don’t know, everyone hates women and hates anyone who’s not a straight man. That’s mainly my customer base. My customer base is the girlies, and that’s not gendered.”
