Mr. Holmes Bakehouse Bandit Bypassed Cash Register for Cruffin Recipe

Thefts are sadly all too common in the restaurant world, but even by that standard, the robbery that went down at the Tendernob's Mr. Holmes Bakehouse early Friday morning was a headscratcher. The perp broke into the bakery in the dead of night, but bypassed a register full of cash, several computers, and a bunch of expensive baking equipment in favor of stealing all of the Instagram-famous, line-crazed bakery's recipes.

"There were about 300 recipes in a binder inside the bakery, and they just opened it up and took them out. Our morning baker got there at 3 a.m. and they were all missing," says co-owner Aaron Caddel of the robbery. The Mr. Holmes crew filed a police report, but Caddel acknowledges that their chances of getting the recipes back are small (luckily, there were computer backups). He also admits that he and co-owner/head baker Ry Stephen are partially to blame: in the crush of getting the months-old bakery's doors open, they neglected to fix a broken door that the thief easily jammed open, and while they'd had a surveillance system installed, they had yet to set it up. Nonetheless, he doesn't think it was an inside job (none of the bakery's employees knew the surveillance system didn't work), and he dismisses any notion that a competitor might be to blame. "We have a really good relationship with all the other bakeries in town, so that’s out of the question. We're all so different from each other."

Nonetheless, fans of Mr. Holmes are advised to be on the lookout for knockoffs of the bakery's treats, most notably their famous cruffins, tall croissants baked in muffin tins. "They'd be hard to knock off, but If someone could duplicate Ry’s really obsessive techniques, they might be able to make it happen," says Caddel. "We’re really flattered that someone would think our recipes are special enough that they would break into our bakery...though it's such a weird robbery, I have to admit that we're mostly just laughing about it."