Every day at 5 a.m., Dawn Baloy steps into the darkened kitchen at Rize Bakery, in the Yawkey Center for Student Services, and turns on the lights. When most of the University is still asleep, she’s hard at work mixing and baking muffins, croissants, and quiche.

“I’m the first one in the building,” says Rize’s head baker. “It’s very quiet here and by the time I open the oven door, the people working all the way upstairs can smell it. They always come downstairs and ask what I’m cooking today.”

Her answer changes from day to day and season to season, but on average, Baloy makes about 160 pastries from scratch each day: nearly three dozen muffins, a dozen Danish pastries, two dozen cupcakes and brownies, four dozen cookies, a handful of scones, and two types of quiche (her top seller). She also whips up macaroons, custom cakes, and three varieties of focaccia bread—red pepper, jalapeño, and salted—for Rize’s popular sandwiches.

The daily grind doesn’t stifle Baloy’s artistic streak, as evidenced by the whirls of buttercream icing and multicolored sprinkles on view in the glass display case. Customers always shop with their eyes first, Baloy says, so if a dessert doesn’t look pretty, they won’t buy it. “I start with that,” she says. She grew up wanting to be an artist, but realized she didn’t want to sit at an easel all day. So she enrolled in culinary school, because baking allowed her to pursue her twin passions: food and art. “At Rize, I make a cupcake look like a turkey,” she says. “At Christmas, the cupcakes look like Santa’s belly with buttons. Or a reindeer or a melted snowman. When customers look at it, they gasp, and to me, that’s the biggest compliment.”

A 20-plus-year BU veteran, Baloy began as pastry chef for the late John Silber (Hon.’95), BU president from 1971 to 1996. She says she has regular customers who drop by to visit (and to gnosh), but she’s always happy to see a new face, like the time she received a special cake order from a dad. “His daughter, a freshman, came in and said, ‘I was told by my dad to come here. I don’t know why,’” Baloy says. “I told her I had something very special for her and ran back and got the box. She opened it and started crying. I’m choking up as I retell the story. She was so happy that her parents didn’t forget her. It made my day.”

Jason Kimball can be reached at jk16@bu.edu.