Kerr told us once that those buns paid our wages." The rush sometimes induced a state of near panic in the front counter staff.
"There would be lineups!" Huntley recalls with a laugh. Depending on the day of the week, Kerr, Huntley and the third Sister of the Order of the Holy Dough, Shirley Kaminski, would bake upwards of 50 dozen buns. Some days it must have seemed as if every soul on campus was in line. Lorraine Huntley holds a pan of cinnamon buns she baked for Alumni Weekend 2013.
For a quarter, a student on a tight budget would get enough calories to last the day. (And as she gently reminds me when we talk, they were technically knots, not buns nor rolls.) Huntley recalls that they were delicious, huge and cheap. The cathedral – the Central Academic Building, or CAB – had been serving its sacred cinnamon buns since 1971 in the basement cafeteria.Įvery day, working in the sepulchral depths of the temple where the buns were produced and sold, Huntley got a good look at the people for whom she was tying the knot: hordes of students so desperate for a bun that it was as if that baked knot of dough, sugar and cinnamon was all that separated pass from fail. Without knowing what a fervent house of worship she was entering, Huntley took the job and was soon doing well enough under Kerr's exacting eye that she was elevated to the role of Holy Knot-Maker. Lorraine Huntley was fresh out of cooking school in 1977 when she was offered a job by the iconic University of Alberta food services manager, Joyce Kerr.