On a Saturday morning in early October, the courtyard outside Rebel Bread in Denver's Design District will fill with folding tables, tasting tickets, and somewhere in the vicinity of eighty baked goods made in home kitchens across the metro. There will be focaccia. There will be layer cakes. There will be two-bite treats, citrus desserts, and biscuits. And there will be a crowd of Denverites wandering between the tables, samples in hand, deciding which stranger's bake deserves their vote.
That is Denver Bake Fest, and it is free to walk into. The event runs Saturday, Oct. 3, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Rebel Bread, 675 S Broadway. Bakers of every skill level — novice home cooks and working professionals alike — bring their entries from home and set them out for the public to taste and judge, county-fair style. Tasting tickets can be bought in advance or on the day, and proceeds go to CHOW, the Culinary Hospitality Outreach and Wellness nonprofit that supports people who work in food and beverage.
The festival's origin story is modest. Zach Martinucci, Rebel Bread's founder and CEO, started Bake Fest as a way to mark the bakery's fifth anniversary. At the time, Rebel Bread was a wholesale operation supplying coffee shops, restaurants, and farmers markets around Denver, plus a small roster of baking classes. The inaugural contest, held Oct. 7, 2023, at Rebel Bread's South Broadway headquarters, offered categories like cake, pie, bread, and chocolate chip cookie, with panels of judges for each and gift cards to local coffee shops as prizes. Martinucci told Colorado Public Radio at the time that the real prize would be bragging rights. "I'm really hoping we'll showcase the creativity that's out there in Denver," he said.
That first year drew entrants like Shivani Upadhayay, a home cook who had started baking during the pandemic lockdown as a way to cope and to rework her relationship with her home country, India. She entered a gajar ka halwa cheesecake — Indian carrot pudding, which she described as spicy, floral, and earthy, folded into a traditional cheesecake — in the cake category. She had seen an Instagram post about the competition and decided on the spot. "I just thought that the best things in life happened spontaneously," she said. "So, I was like, why not?"
Four years on, the event has grown in scope without losing that improvisational feel. This year's contest spans five all-new categories: focaccia, layer cake, two-bite treats, citrus, and biscuits. Martinucci has said the categories are chosen deliberately, some broad enough to invite wild creativity and others narrow enough that judges can compare technical execution side by side. In past years that mix produced entries ranging from heritage sourdough made with Colorado-grown grains to malted-salted s'mores brownies, strawberry-chamomile jam bars, dairy-free Oreo blondies, gluten-free apple cheesecake bars, butternut brioche buns, and pumpkin cream puffs. The categories are typically set by Martinucci along with Rebel Bread staff and members of Denver's baking community.
What is new this year is infrastructure. Rebel Bread has expanded its South Broadway space with a cafe and a dedicated teaching kitchen, adding roughly 4,800 square feet to the existing operation. That expansion is what allows Bake Fest to host hands-on demos and behind-the-scenes bakery tours for the first time. This year's demos include baguette and croissant shaping, plus a session from Stir Cooking School on Mexican ceviche and homemade tortilla chips. There is also a new education stage, where Dr. Martha Calvert of the CSU Spur Food Innovation Lab will talk about sensory science — the biology of taste and what is actually happening inside a sourdough starter — and a panel of bakery owners will discuss what it takes to run a bakery in Denver.
"We just want people to see what our world is like and be excited about it," Martinucci said.
For families, there are kid-specific activities and a family area, including cookie decorating and baking-themed entertainment. Past years have featured baguette jugglers, a baking magician, and a life-sized crossword puzzle. Martinucci's advice for parents is simple: if your kids are old enough to hold tasting tickets and collect samples, turn them loose. "It's a fun activity for them to get to see over 80 different bakers and decide what it is that they want to taste and have that little interaction," he said.
For at least one young baker, Bake Fest has become something closer to a tradition. Lyla H. is a fifth grader who entered the competition in its very first year, when she was in second grade. She learned to bake from her mother, a pastry chef and the owner of Darlene's Ice Cream, and she has collected several awards along the way, including the kids category, best in show, and People's Choice — two of them last year, for an entry called "Lyla's Luau Pie." When she first entered, she was among the youngest contestants in the room. This year she is competing in the adult category.
Her entry is a pie built on calamansi, a small Southeast Asian citrus, rather than the key limes she used before. "This year I decided I wanted to enter the citrus category because I know that there's more than just three citruses: lemon, lime, and orange," she said. The pie layers a lime-zest and coconut crust with calamansi curd, lemongrass, Thai lime whipped cream, and a Fruity Pebbles crunch. Her advice to first-time competitors is uncomplicated: "Even if you don't win, keep your head up and keep trying as you go on."
Martinucci's own path to the oven ran through the classroom. He grew up near San Francisco in a family that loved to cook and eat, studied culinary anthropology at UCLA and in Bologna, Italy, and trained at the San Francisco Baking Institute before moving to Denver in 2017. A relative had opened a small French bakery in the Bay Area, and Martinucci learned to bake sourdough and croissants alongside him. Back home, he started selling loaves to neighbors, sometimes baking flavored breads based on his friends' personalities — an anthropologist's habit he has never quite shaken. He founded Rebel Bread in the fall of 2018 with what he has described as a love of the culture, storytelling, and education around food. "Bread felt like this perfect canvas for community and storytelling," he said.
The bakery grew from its Five Points beginnings into a wholesale operation and moved into the Design District in 2020. It bakes with regional grains to honor its Colorado roots, and its bakers are encouraged to reinvent classics with a page from their own recipe books. The space is designed to be transformable, hosting everything from Friday-night sourdough pizza parties to classes for home bakers.
That educational thread is why Bake Fest exists in its current form, and why Martinucci keeps returning to the idea that the event is, as he puts it, "bigger and smaller than you think it's going to be." It is not a stadium-scale food festival. It is a courtyard full of people who cared enough to bake something at home and show up with it. "Being years in, it's neat to see how other people's stories or successes are shaped around what we do," he said. He traces that feeling to his own start: a small baking competition at his college, the first time he baked for other people, the first time strangers tried his work and gave him the encouragement and connections to keep going.
That is roughly the bargain Bake Fest offers its attendees. You buy a strip of tasting tickets, you walk a small loop, and you try something you would never have ordered — a calamansi pie, a squash biscuit, a miso-maple creation from a baker you have never heard of. You might learn how sourdough starter works, or discover a bakery you did not know existed. "I'm always excited for the bakers, to see what they bring," Martinucci said. "Getting to meet them all that morning and try them and realize, 'Remember why we did all this?' and know that that's what our guests get to experience the same feeling. That's my favorite part."
Baker registration runs through Sunday, Sept. 27, or until capacity is reached. Attendance is free; tasting tickets are sold online and at the event. More information is at denverbakefest.com.