Cloud 9's Baker Takes Natural to New Heights

Lola Kirya pulls a square pan of brownies, almost pure chocolate, out of her new bakery's oven. It's dark outside but the kitchen is still lit.

The dense brownies will cool for one hour and she'll return to the oven before the sun rises to slide in freshly mixed batter for poppy-seed muffins, coconut breads and a pumpkin loaf she'll whip up on a whim.

Behind her are shelves stocked with organic sugars—some dyed pink with beet juice—and paper coffee cups made with recycled products—they'll hold coffee brewed with kangen water.

"It's a bit more time-consuming and a bit more expensive," she said of carefully selecting the chemical-free ingredients and eco-friendly products. "But if my love is going to be baking organic, how do I wrap them in bleached paper?"

Kirya recalls that when she was a girl growing up in England, her crepe-like pancakes were popular among family friends and cookies made by "touch, vision, taste" were devoured by her brothers. Now, after earning degrees in economics and engineering and working in publishing and human resources, she's selling her sweets at Cloud 9 Bakers in San Juan Capistrano.

She's using original recipes converted to include only all-natural ingredients, including many treats that are gluten-free. 

"The passion was always baking," she said. "I always baked. Every day. The only difference was I switched to a very healthy kind of baking."

She stopped cooking and baking with dairy, wheat and yeast when her son was placed on a smorgasbords of medications. As an infant, he was hospitalized with labored breathing, prompting doctors to dole out prescriptions.

She wanted him off the drugs, so she tested him for allergies. That was about 10 years ago when there were hardly any gluten or dairy-free foods sold at grocery stores. And most agree that the ones that could be found were, as Kirya put it, "unpalatable."

Now her three very healthy children are helping at the bakery on Rancho Viejo Road, a shop conveniently sandwiched between a fitness studio and a hair salon.

It opened two weeks ago, steadily gaining traffic via word of mouth from sweet-toothed customers such as Steven Barnes, who works next door at .

"Quite frankly, I thought she didn't have very many products," he recalls of his first trip to the bakery. He had assumed Cloud 9 sold regular preservative-chalked treats.

Kirya admits there will be times when customers will come into the store to find that their desired pumpkin loaf was the only one she baked that morning, or that there's no coffee. She refuses to over-stock, and the type of all-natural ingredients she uses don't stay fresh for days.

There are also loyal customers who know her from the wholesale business she ran under the same name for the past year and a half. She has sold her baked goods at , and .

She's taking special orders now and gearing up to sell cupcakes, which she couldn't distribute as a wholesaler because vendors couldn't keep them fresh. Soon there will also be pies stuffed with fresh fruit.

At the counter when customer Carolann Mashouf walks in Thursday morning: snicker doodles, macaroons, honey oat and cinnamon oat crunch bars, aged balsamic vinegars, raw drinks and honey from a Long Beach farm.

Mashouf, of Laguna Niguel, said her daughter who's on a gluten-free diet is "going to be in heaven."