Orange Blossom: the Killingsworth window and the cardamom bun

On Killingsworth in Northeast Portland, people slow down to look into one particular corner window, and it's well worth going inside. Orange & Blossom is pastry chef Marisa Kroes's vegan patisserie in Vernon, at 1612 Northeast Killingsworth on the corner of 16th. The case has seasonal tarts, farm-fruit danishes and olive-oil cakes, but the cardamom bun with orange blossom glaze is what you come for, and it's one of the few things that stays on the menu while everything else changes with what the farms bring in.

Through the window you can see laminated dough, glazed tops, fresh fruit, and edible flowers on the tarts. Inside, the shop is prettier than you'd expect from a former farmers-market stand, with vintage bentwood chairs, a burnt-orange couch that matches the name, and floral wallpaper. Kroes came out of restaurant pastry, including the James Beard-winning Slanted Door in San Francisco and a large in-house program at Facebook headquarters, and she got tired of desserts that only worked if they were built on eggs, butter and cream. She started Orange & Blossom as a market project in 2019 and opened the shop in 2023, and it bakes in small batches with organic produce, with everything plant-based.

The cardamom bun is a soft vegan brioche swirled with cardamom, brown sugar, cinnamon, orange zest and vegan butter, finished with the orange blossom glaze, which dries to a pale sheen. If there's a lemon poppyseed bun with chamomile flowers on top, or a raspberry maritozzo filled with vanilla bean crème and Groundwork Organics raspberries, add one. Then look at the seasonal things. Ingredients from Groundwork, Sunrise Organics, Baird Orchards and Camas Country Mill end up in a pistachio olive oil cake under pistachio buttercream and local edible flowers, a zucchini rye spice cake that tastes like zucchini, or a Saturday tart piled with red raspberries, golden raspberries, blackberries and strawberries under house elderflower syrup.

If you already have a bun, the cookie to take home is the miso brown sugar, a vanilla dough made in a brown-butter style with organic red miso and Jacobsen flaky salt on top. People also go for the sourdough chocolate chip and the gluten-free buckwheat ganache brownie. On the savory side there's a dill pickle biscuit with ranch seasoning and cheddar, a pesto pizza brioche danish with sungold tomatoes, and a curry chickpea sandwich on focaccia after 11. Everything is vegan, so you don't need to ask about that, but only some things are gluten-free, so do ask about that.

The shop is open Wednesday through Sunday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. The morning pastry sells, so if the window is what made you pull over, get in line early. Parking on Killingsworth takes the usual northeast hunting, and it's an easy morning stop when you're already north of Fremont.

Regulars keep going back because a lot of vegan baking tastes like a substitute, and Kroes's pastry tastes like a pastry chef rebuilt the recipes starting from the produce, with cardamom you can actually taste. Get the bun and whatever fruit the farms brought that week, and don't count on coming back later, because by then the morning pastry is usually gone.

The essentials live on the place page: Orange & Blossom