Bake Zone CT: Handcrafted Small Batch Brioche Donuts in Stamford

Dubai chocolate - filled with pistachio ganache and kataifi pastry

Covering the hospitality industry for as long as I have, it’s a given you’ll come across people who left a completely different career to pursue their passion in cooking or baking.

Sandeep Gupta is one of those people. She left her job doing app design and once she moved from San Francisco to Stamford, she started her own donut business.

“I told my husband (Mayank), who’s also a developer and does IT, that I love designing apps and logos and everything, but that I want to follow my passion as a baker,” Gupta says. “I actually liked my job! It was creative and I wasn’t just coding. I made buttons, themes, making apps look pretty. That was me.”

Gupta’s love for baking didn’t appear out of the blue as an adult hobby when she wasn’t in the tech design world, it actually started when she was a kid, baking cakes, cupcakes, and the like with her mom.

Since childhood, she never really stopped baking.

“I took a few baking courses in high school,” she says. “I pursued computer science in college, finished my degree, got a job as a product designer, but I always baked throughout the years for friends and family.”

While still in San Francisco, it was then that Gupta told her husband that she wanted to take the next steps to bring a donut business to fruition, so she went to “donut school.”

“I took a bunch of online baking courses,” she explains. “I learned a lot of new skills about proofing, temperature, and started testing. If it was too cold, the dough would take a long time (to be ready), hot and humid, a lot faster, sometimes a couple of hours. Once I felt like I had it, Mayank, who’s from New York, said we shouldn’t start a business here (in San Francisco) until we moved back to the East Coast. He’s never said no to me and has always been very supportive.”

Once the couple settled in Downtown Stamford at the beginning of 2025, Gupta hosted pop ups in the apartment building, giving her filled, creative, brioche donuts away to residents for free, simply looking to receive feedback in return.

“It wasn’t about making money, but more about connecting with people, something I liked about doing app design, too, was talking to people and connecting with them,” Gupta says. “The opinions I got about my donuts were all positive, then people started asking how they could order. I eventually started a website and hosting pop ups.”

Top (from L-R) - Banana pudding, toasted hazelnut, crème brûlée

Bottom - Strawberry cheesecake and Dubai chocolate

Her business, called Bake Zone, has since held well-attended pop-up events all over Stamford at PROOF Coffee Roasters, Harbor Point Farmers Market, Mill River Park, Corbo’s Southside Deli, and Third Place by Half Full Brewery.

As to what you can expect flavor wise?

Strawberry cheesecake. Crème brûlée. Banana pudding. Mississippi mud pie. Ube. Apple pie. Dubai chocolate.

But don’t get too hung up on any one flavor as Gupta likes to switch them in and out and add new or seasonal flavors to keep it interesting. But that doesn’t mean she’s not receptive to your ideas.

“I always like talking to people and hearing about which flavors they like,” she says. “I want it to be unique so people can enjoy them. Some of these aren’t normal flavors, but there’s been a good response so far, even on donuts like the everything donut with cream cheese; it’s a hint of salty, plus cream cheese filling. It’s really good. The black sesame is outside the box, not bitter, and people really liked it.”

Crème brûlée that Gupta triple torches on the outside for that burnt sugar taste

What Gupta is going for, too, with her 48-hour fermented (first cold proofed, then at room temperature) brioche donuts is a softer, more buttery, richer donut, that’s not sugary, and filled to the max with lighter creams and custards.

With a small batch product, what she also cares about is doing it right and getting it right.

“I usually ask that people pre order a few days before because the dough takes two days to ferment and sometimes pick ups can be delayed because the dough has to be perfect,” Gupta says. “Then I fry them, let them cool, and fill them. I don’t use food coloring or any preservatives. Everything is from scratch. With the pistachios, I roast them, grind them, and make the paste myself. Nothing is out of a package. My husband’s advice when I started was that I should make something that I would enjoy.”

Currently, Bake Zone does take the previously mentioned pre orders on Gupta’s website where you select a day and time for your pickup. If she hosts a pop up (those are walk in only, no preorders), you’ll easily be able to find that on Bake Zone’s Instagram account.

“We are looking for a storefront; that’s the end goal,” she says. “In the meantime, I’m looking into doing more pop ups. The website is best for preorders, but if you need to DM me to arrange, that’s fine. It’s just another way for me to connect with my customers.”

bakezonect.com
Instagram @bakezonect