FOOD

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17.4111 _ 1 .....id

CARE PROJECT

The

Compassionate
Confectioner

A baker's cake-making dream
reaches multi-layered heights.

BY SHELLI LIEBMAN DORFMAN

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANGIE BAAN

B

ill Knofsky can explain both the sweet success of his
Wholley Molley Bake Shop in Eastpointe and his ability
to help support the needy with the same two words: car-
rot cake.
The store's top-selling signature item, Miss Hilma's Sinfully Divine
Carrot Cake, not only helps keep Knofsky and his partner Darryl John in
business, but the charitable donation they make to the Eastpointe
Community Chest Networking Forum for every cake sold helps support
educational and outreach projects. They also donate the store's daily sur-
plus to the homeless at Solid Ground Transitional House in Roseville.
Outside of the shop, Knofsky also cares for others, having spent the
last seven years as the foster parent to a boy, now 15, and acting as
guardian for a mentally disabled former neighbor.
His hunger-related charity involvement — including longtime support
of the Capuchin Soup Kitchen in Detroit, Forgotten Harvest in Oakland
County, the Salvation Army and local homeless shelters — stems from his
own childhood memories in Royal Oak.
"We grew up very poor," he says of his family, who is Jewish. "And I
know what it's like to go hungry."
His love of baking also originated in his youth. "Every day after school,
I either went to the doughnut shop where my mother worked or to my
neighbor, Hilma Gilbert's house. She lived next door and didn't have any
kids. She would teach me how to bake. And she taught me her secret car-
rot-cake recipe."
Knofsky says he knew when he was just 8 that someday he would be a
baker. Before Wholley Molley, Knofsky owned other bake shops, includ-
ing Sugar Sweet Donuts in Detroit, which he says grew to be the largest
wholesale doughnut business in the area, supplying grocery chains,
including Kroger. But after 9-11, the loss of his biggest client forced him
to close the store.
"My dreams about baking went down with the bankruptcy," he says.
"I didn't ever want to go back into business."
While attending a Landmark Education course in Livonia, Knofsky
says he learned to leave the past in the past and to realize unfinished
hopes. "One dream I hadn't fulfilled was the one where I always used to
tell Hilma that someday I would make her cake famous," he says of the

Continued on page 34

The artist at work: Bill Knofsky in Wholley Money's kitchen.

32 •

NOVEMBER 2005 • JNPLATINUM