Sweet Baker

...How sweet. And so is the motherly goat-woman.

I'm the most sensitive man on God's green earth!
Here's a rose bouquet...
I also baked you some fresh Crème Brûlée...

— Ninja Sex Party, "Why I Cry"

When people think of baking, they often think of their mother's fresh chocolate chip cookies, warm loaves of bread, and sugary cakes. It's linked to sweets, motherhood, childhood nostalgia, and hard, passionate work. So, it's no wonder that the characters who like to bake are often portrayed to be just as sweet as the food they're making.

Female bakers will be cute and caring; male bakers may be less obviously soft, but will still be kindhearted Nice Guys, and perhaps also strong from all the hard work, but remember that in this case, Real Men Cook and Real Men Wear Pink. Regardless of gender, they're often portrayed as idealistic, friendly, and passionate about their craft. They're also typically more feminine in nature than they are masculine; after all, Feminine Women Can Cook, so it stands to reason that good bakers are also feminine and may even like to bake because they're feminine.

Often prone to saying things like "the secret ingredient is love", and may also cook with Grandma's Recipe — if they aren't the Granny Classic themselves. They're also typically a Supreme Chef in the field of baking, not just someone with a general interest.

Contrast Angry Chef and Evil Chef. Compare and Contrast with The Blacksmith, who shares this trope's positive connotation and hard work ethic, but in a more masculine field. See also Through His Stomach.

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Examples:

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• The Mexican brand of tortillas and other bakery products, Tia Rosa, uses this trope for the eponymous tia who is the mascot of the brand.

Anime & Manga

• Moe "Suzu" Suzuya in Asteroid in Love. She is effectively the heir of the most popular bakery in town and spends a lot of time in this regard. Despite her Lovable Sex Maniac antics, the cast generally treats her as a nice and considerate person, and some major plots in this series would not go forward if she didn't provide her encouragement.
• Seigi of The Case Files of Jeweler Richard is a kind-hearted baker boy who is eager to make desserts for his boss, Richard.
• Food Wars!: Subverted. Momo is a pastry specialist, as well as the Token Mini-Moe on the Absurdly Powerful Student Council and frequently works as a Kawaisa consultant. However, she is also a full-fledged Bitch in Sheep's Clothing who hands out derogatory nicknames like candy, and isn't afraid to call everyone not on her level a "loser".
• Horimiya: Izumi Miyamura, who works for his parents' bakery in his free time. Though you probably wouldn't guess it by looking at him.
• Kiki's Delivery Service gives us a threefer: there's Osono, who is friendly, caring, and motherly (she's heavily pregnant throughout most of the movie), and her husband Fukuo, who is far quieter (he has only one line) but fits neatly into the strong and hard-working male baker mould. There's also the old woman cooking herring pie for her granddaughter, what Kiki helps.
• Rinko Yamato of My Love Story!! is a huge sweetheart and The Cutie, to the point where she feels guilt over wanting to be closer to Takeo and fitting this personality, she loves to bake cute deserts. Many of her and Takeo's dates feature him getting to try her newest creation and Takeo's first real competitor for her affection is an employee at a bakery she gets a job at.
• Lucy-May of the Southern Rainbow: Jane Mack is a Cool Big Sis to Lucy-May and Kate, and owns a bakery. She even offers Clara a job there since the Popples were suffering from financial issues at the time. She was also the caretaker for her ill brother, Bernard, before he passed away.
• Aki from Natsuneko's debut manga Spicy Sweets is a pastry baker by trade and The Ingenue in terms of personality. Yuu's Love Allegory for her relationship with Aki is a cake that never gets smaller, no matter how much of it she eats.
• Ojamajo Doremi: Doremi and her friends are all cute and nice Magical Girls and own a bakery in the third season. Momoko's former mentor Majomonroe was also a friendly Cute Witch and pastry chef who befriended her when she was a child.
• In Pokémon the Series: XY, Serena is very sweet-natured with a huge crush on Ash, and she loves baking treats like Macarons and Poké Puffs.
• Pretty Cure:
  • Futari wa Pretty Cure Splash★Star: Saki's parents, Saori and Daisuke, are bakers who run their own bakery, and are loving parents who care deeply about her and her sister Minori. In their appearance in Power of Hope ~PreCure Full Bloom~, they are very supportive of now-adult Saki leaving to take an apprenticeship in France.
  • Suite Pretty Cure ♪: Protagonist Kanade is a member of the school's baking club, where she makes cakes. She is the sweetest and most feminine member of the Suite Cures, and a good friend to Hummy, Hibiki, Ellen, and Ako.
  • Taken up to eleven in KiraKira★Pretty Cure à la Mode: Each of the Cures is a baker at the KIRAKIRA Patisserie, and some sort of nice girl; Ichika is a Genki Girl who specializes in strawberry shortcake, Himari is a sweet Shrinking Violet who specializes in pudding, Aoi is a Hot-Blooded pal who specializes in ice cream, Yukari is a Jerk with a Heart of Gold who specializes in macarons, Akira is the Team Dad who specializes in chocolate, and Ciel is The Atoner who is a famous baker from France.
  • Hirogaru Sky! Pretty Cure: Mashiro, like Kanade before her, is the most feminine and sweet of the Cures, and loves to bake bread in the shape of clouds.
• Sailor Moon: Makoto Kino/Sailor Jupiter is a kind, nurturing Team Mom who enjoys baking sweets for her friends and dreams of one day having her own bakery.
• Yakitate!! Japan has its protagonist Azuma, a young man devoted to creating a national bread of Japan. Cheerful and kind-hearted, but a bit of a dunce, he approaches his craft with gusto, using his bread to do things like give people so much joy that they drop dead and come back to life or help people go back in time to meet their dead parents.

Fan Works

• Danganronpa: Komm Susser Tod: Nanae Mochizuki is the Ultimate Baker, and also an extremely cheerful girl who tries to help out in whatever ways she can to raise the spirits of everyone else even as the bodies begin to pile up.
• In My Huntsman Academia, Izuku, a Nice Guy with Chronic Hero Syndrome, takes up baking and pastry making as a hobby to satisfy his teammate Nora's pancake cravings. He becomes surprisingly good at it, baking two delicious cakes for Pyrrha's birthday and another as an apology to Weiss after he was Innocently Insensitive to her. He's also the type of person who wouldn't hesitate to break his own arm to save someone's life.
• In Pieces, Bruno is a pastry chef instead of a gangster in this universe, who has unofficially adopted Mista, Narancia, Giorno, and Fugo. He also hires Abbacchio to work in his bakery, after the latter loses his job as a police officer, and the two of them eventually fall in love.

Film — Animated

• Cinderella II: Dreams Come True: Cinderella's stepsister Anastasia has a good Character Development when she falls in love with an adorkable baker, a kind man who likes her the way she is.
• Zootopia: Gideon Grey goes from a mean bully as a child to a sweet-natured, downright dorkily cute baker as an adult. He apologizes to Judy for bullying her in the past.

Film — Live-Action

• High School Musical: Zeke is one of the only Wildcats to initially accept Troy's singing hobby, as well as being a general Nice Guy with a crush on Sharpay. He's also a passionate and talented baker who brings his friends treats and "dreams of making the perfect Creme Brulee".
• The Princess Switch's Stacy is a hardworking, down-to-earth, kind young woman whose dream is to own her own bakery. She's good enough of a baker to qualify for an exclusive international baking contest, and sweet enough to charm a foreign prince.
• Twisted but ultimately played straight in Stranger Than Fiction — when Harold is sent to audit Ana's bakery, she is rude and deliberately standoffish to him because he's an IRS agent and she's a Granola Girl who donates baked goods to the homeless and refuses to pay the exact percentage of her taxes that would have gone to fund "national defense, corporate loan-outs, and campaign discretionary funds" (27%, to be exact). But Ana eventually regrets her treatment of Harold and begins to warm up to him, even giving him cookies as a form of apology for how she treated him earlier. Harold sees the kind and caring side of Ana, and the two begin to fall in love.
• Agatha, the assistant of Mendl's from The Grand Budapest Hotel. She helps bake the finest pastries in all of Zubrowka, she's cute as a button even with her face covered in flour as well as a sweet girlfriend to Zero and she also proves to be heroic when helping him and Mr. Gustave H. in the climax.
• Jacob Kowalski from the Fantastic Beasts is a very nice and friendly man who intends to open a bakery. He gets involved in the plot of the first movie when his briefcase (full of pastries he intended to show to a bank to get a money loan in order to gather funds to open his store) gets switched with Newt Scamander's. At the end of the movie, he succeeds in opening his bakery.
• Cookie, the protagonist of First Cow, embodies this trope in spades. Living in an unpleasant fur-trapping town in 1820s America, he's a mild-mannered soul with a passion for baking sweet pastries.
• The Oracle from The Matrix films is frequently shown baking cookies. At one point she says to Sati that "Cookies need love, like everything else".

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Literature

• The Hunger Games: Peeta, who comes from a family of bakers and who Katniss thinks of as "the boy with the bread" is a sensitive, empathetic, and idealistic character who truly loves Katniss.
• Like Water for Chocolate: The main character Tita loves cooking and was born in a kitchen. Her meals are more hearty than sweet. Whatever her mood, it is transferred to the people around her through her meals, with Magic Realism.
• In My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!, some of Maria's happiest childhood memories were baking cookies with her parents. After the discovery of her light magic causes her life to fall apart, she starts baking them herself, both to recapture the feelings in her memories and to offer them to others in the hope of making friends.

Live-Action TV

• Mrs. Davis on Our Miss Brooks loves to bake and to cook in general.
• How I Met Your Mother: Ted's girlfriend Victoria is a professional baker who has a little shop called Buttercup Bakery in New York. She also caters weddings and other fancy occasions. She's a lovely and very caring person. When she and Ted have a long-distance relationship, she sends him care packages with cupcakes.
• Pushing Daisies: Ned is a pie maker who is sweet, humble, kind, generous, and altogether one of the nicest people you could ever meet. He can also resurrect the dead.
• Ted Lasso: The titular character is an absurdly kind and friendly man. In an attempt to befriend his new boss Rebecca, he brings her a box of delicious biscuits every morning and refuses to tell her where he gets them lest she stop meeting with him. It is later shown that he bakes them himself every night.
• Tipi Tales: Great-Grandmother and Great-Grandfather are both kindly elders who enjoy baking cookies and pies.
• Subverted in You (2018). Love is a pretty, kind-hearted, and well-mannered woman who is a supreme baker. In season three, she is seen as a promising, young suburban wife who is opening up a neighborhood bakery. It's part of her Mask of Sanity — she's an impulsive and emotional murderer — but her baking skills are genuine.

Music

• Ninja Sex Party: Parodied and invoked in "Why I Cry". When Danny is trying to convince a girl he's the most "sensitive man on God's green Earth", one of his actions is to gift her some Creme Brulee he'd just baked... despite that in the video, it's Ninja Brian who actually made it.

Theatre

• Waitress: Supreme piemaker Jenna begins the story broken down by her abusive husband Earl, but she is a fundamentally good-natured person whom Dawn even calls the embodiment of kindness and goodness. This character trait becomes more apparent as Jenna comes out of her shell, and by the end she is both a loving mother and friend, and successful pie shop owner.

Video Games

• Sugar, the Player Character/protagonist of mobile game Bakery Blitz, operates a flying airship bakery on her mission to "bring back sweetness" after the evil Baroness von Bitter erased everyone's memory of dessert. In all her cutscene interactions with customers, Sugar is shown to be both kind and considerate.
• The title character of Bonnie's Bakery is an adorable and nice human baker who's friends with all the talking animals in town, and wants nothing more than to satisfy them with quality foods, at least in the daytime — by night, she turns into an Evil Chef who chops up her sapient animal customers to use as ingredients.
• In Born of Bread, Papa Baker is the sweetest, and kindest chef you’ll ever meet. Plus he was kind enough to adopt his own creation, Loaf.
• In Bug Fables, Crisbee, the chef of Defiant Root, has a friendly, can-do personality. While he can cook all the same things as the other chefs, he's clearly baker-themed, as his oven is a bakery oven, he sells flour in his store and advertises how useful it is for making baked goods, and his specialty is a pastry: the Crisbee Donut.
• The Elder Scrolls: Legends has the Grisly Gourmet that inverts this trope with gruesome implications of making sweet rolls Game of Thrones style.
• Hajime in Ensemble Stars! is a cute and rather girly Shy Blue-Haired Boy who likes to bake for his younger brother and sister and his seniors in the Tea Club.
• In Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Mercedes is a kind, nurturing big sister type who also loves baking. She finds it easy because she loves sweet things, but cooking is more difficult for her because she doesn't like spicy tastes.
• Harvest Moon: Ellen from Harvest Moon 64 is a sweet young woman who works at a bakery. She's also an optional bachelorette.
• Tammy in I Was a Teenage Exocolonist is sweet and kind, just like the cake she bakes for Sol on their birthday.
• Cutie the Elephant of It Takes Two. While her screentime is short, as part of her Oblivious Guilt Slinging she manages to check off every "Sweet Innocent Character" trope there is—including offering to bake endless fresh cookies for the protagonists and showering them with love and kindness when she notices they are sad. All this while the reason they're sad is that their mission is to Kill Her...
• Lonely Wolf Treat: Mochi's aunt Castella is a kindly old lady who sells crepes on the street for a living and is noted for being one of the few rabbits to not be irrationally hateful towards wolves. She makes Trick a crepe for free upon seeing how exhausted Trick is from their travels.
• Pokémon Scarlet and Violet have the Bug-Type Gym Leader Katy, a kind and maternal woman who runs a bakery when she's off-duty. She's introduced feeding her Pokémon some sweets and offers the player character some cupcakes after their battle.
• In Potion Permit, Martha and Mariele are kind ladies who like baking cookies for the other residents of Moonbury.
• Princess Peach: Showtime!: In the trailer, Patissier Peach is an adorable baker who helps make desserts.
  • Within the entire series, Peach often bakes cakes and would invite Mario over to share with. However, most of the time Bowser would just disrupt their peace.
• Patty Eclaire is one in Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. She is the town baker and is the only one willing to befriend and take in Espella when the rest of the town virtually shuns her. She treats her employees (Phoenix Wright and Maya Fey) like family and gladly helps Professor Layton and Luke when they arrive in town.
• Haley from Stardew Valley is an odd example, as she starts as an Alpha Bitch who mellows out as the player character raises their friendship level with her. Her love for baking is hinted at when it's revealed that she wrote to the In-Universe cooking show asking for the recipe for pink cake. If the player character marries her, she will frequently bake sweet stuff for them saying how she wants them "to be full of energy for the day".
  • The unofficial expansion mod, Ridgeside Village, has Alissa's mother, Malaya, who upon returning to the village from travelling all over the world with her husband, opens a pastry shop at the Log Cabin Hotel, which if eaten by the player character give many useful magical buffs. She mentions that she learned to bake pastries for her daughter when she was little and during her travels, she learned different baking techniques from all over the world. Bonus points for revealing later that she's actually a mermaid.
• Twisted Wonderland: Trey Clover comes from a family of pâtissiers, and he's a gentle, caring Team Dad who likes to bake treats for other students.
• Toriel from Undertale (the current provider of the trope image) is a motherly goat lady with a kind personality who frequently bakes pies, and in the True Pacifist ending, can adopt Frisk as her own child if the player chooses so, with the post-credit epilogue showing her leaving Frisk a pie in their room.
• In Valkyria Chronicles, Alicia's goal after the war is to become a baker, whose kind side tends to come out through her baking. After mistaking Welkin for a spy and holding him at gunpoint, she shows her softer side by bringing him some bread she baked herself as an apology.

Visual Novel

• Doki Doki Literature Club!: Natsuki is introduced as the girl who made cupcakes in anticipation of the player character's arrival, and the game hammers in how it's not only her baking that is sweet and cutesy but that she is too. Despite her Tsundere ways, she proves to be a secret sweetheart who writes cute, simple poems, reads cute slice-of-life manga, and cares deeply for her friends.
• Miu Iruma from Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony shows shades of this, all while mixed with Black Comedy. In her final Free Time Event with Shuichi Saihara, Miu has come to terms with being in love with him and decides to bake him some sweets, like a pie, some cookies, and chocolates. The thing is... Miu added some "hidden ingredients" into her treats. Her pie has her hair, her cookies have her fingernails, and her chocolates are mixed with her blood, all because she wants the person she likes to eat her.
• Galaxy Angel: Milfeulle Sakuraba is a cheerful and sweet girl who's always friendly to everyone. While she's overall a great cook, pastries and cakes are her specialty, and everyone aboard the Elsior loves them. She even takes to work at a bakery following her temporary retirement between the first and second games in her route.
  • In the sequel trilogy, Galaxy Angel II, protagonist Kazuya Shiranami was studying to become a pastry chef before he was drafted into the military and he's often praised by the Luxiole's crew for his culinary skills, especially when making desserts. He's also quick to endear himself to the RUNE Angels with his kind and sweet personality.
• Momoko Takamachi from both Triangle Heart 3 and its spin-off, the Lyrical Nanoha series, is a baker by trade and an epitome of the Good Parents trope. In the latter continuity, Momoko is strongly implied to be Nanoha's main role model and the main reason why her daughter is both so selflessly heroic and so down-to-earth (Nanoha's badass streak, on the other hand, probably comes from her ex-Ninja dad Shiro).

Webcomics

• Check, Please!: Protagonist Eric is an extremely talented amateur pastry chef (according to him, pies "just happen" when he's anywhere near an oven) and is an adorable dorky Camp Gay Nice Guy who loathes physical violence. Ironically, he's also a collegiate hockey player, which makes his lack of aggression problematic.
• Cursed Princess Club: Gwendolyn has a love for cooking, particularly pastries. Her brother Jamie judges her food as incredibly delicious because she always cooks it with love and keeps who she's cooking for in mind.
• Manly Guys Doing Manly Things: Invoked. Tank brings banana bread into the office, even though he can't eat it, in order to make his co-workers more comfortable around an 800 lb cyborg Super-Soldier with severe anger management issues.
• Questionable Content: Elliot, a baker at the Secret Bakery, is an Endearingly Dorky Gentle Giant who makes friends easily and happily shares his love of breadmaking. He even takes it in stride when he learns that one of his customers has a bread fetish and gives her some pointers in the art of sourdough.

Web Videos

• Dr. Crafty: Pepper, the show's Team Chef. She's also quite The Cutie and the sweetest member of the whole cast. The size of her heart is only matched by the size of her belly.
• On the Dream SMP, Niki is usually a very kind person and gifted her friends with homemade cakes in the L'Manburg era. The beginning of her healing process after her Heel Realization two seasons later is also symbolized by her starting to bake again.
• Emma Approved: Emma's friend Annie Taylor is a pastry chef and "power homemaker". She's a very nice and friendly young woman.
• Subverted with ShadowApples of SMPLive, who's a baker with extraordinarily high prices that cause other server members to consider his bread store a scam. He also runs a whole Cult dedicated to bread.

Western Animation

• Tree Trunks in Adventure Time is a sweet, motherly little old lady dwarf elephant who loves baking apple pies for her friends.
• In one episode of Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, Eduardo pretends to be "Ed Baker" during a blackout. Like Eduardo himself, "Ed Baker" is a kindly baker who makes pies for everyone in the Kingdom of Kaboom. This alias would later become both a Chekhov's Gun and Brick Joke when Goo's imaginary alien warlords regard Ed Baker's pies as "The Greatest Thing in the Universe", which stops them from antagonizing the cast.
• Miraculous Ladybug: Marinette's family owns a bakery and they're all very kindhearted people; Marinette Dupain-Cheng is the titular hero and her parents are caring and affectionate.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Pinkie Pie is the jovial kind of sweet baker at the Sugar Cube Corner, alongside being the local party planner of Ponyville. She helps manage the shop with her bosses, babysits their children, and her jovially sweet personality spreads joy and laughter to the customers and her friends.
  • Applejack is a downplayed example, being a kind and loyal Team Mom who likes to bake some apple-themed baked goods. However, she's an apple farmer by profession rather than a baker.
  • Sugar Belle's special talent is baking, and she's very kind, friendly, and according to Big Mac (who's in love with, and eventually marries her), "sweeter than everything in her bakery".
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: Queen Comet the Chef, Moon's mother and Star's grandmother, was famed for her culinary skills. She especially loved to bake and often did so with her daughter as Moon was growing up. She was also a genuine example of the The High Queen (as opposed to many of Mewini's other queens who publicised the image to reassure their citizens but had personal failings and rarely lived up to it) as well as the one who tried to end conflicts with the Monsters going against centuries of prejudice and hate, and almost brought about a new world that would benefit all. Unfortunately her kind-hearted and trusting nature led to her underestimating how hate-filled Toffee of the Septarians was, enabling him to murder her.
• Tuca & Bertie: Bertie, although her attempts to join the industry show us some decidedly non-sweet bakers. Nonetheless, she's kind enough that Speckle started seeing her after a brief interaction at a party. Helps that Speckle's into that sort of thing.

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