The ovens are on, the Hobart is humming, the curd is curdling, the bread is baking and the people are standing in line. La Baguette French Bread & Pastry Shop has reopened in Chickasaw Oaks Plaza and while the ownership is new, the other faces are familiar.

There’s Ta Rasasack, still baking bread after 35 years. Kevin White, who started at the bakery in 1987, is the pastry chef turning out the sweets. And there’s Loretta Bennett, a 37-year employee, who takes over the finish work when White is done.

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“I’m the cake decorator,” she said. “That’s what I do. I decorate cakes.”

And Picasso painted pictures.

Sure, she decorates cakes. She gets the icing smooth and pipes on the flowers, stems and squiggles. But Bennett is also the magician behind the petit fours.

On Sept. 8, she started the day making a batch of Swiss buttercream. She starts at the stove, cooking 30 pounds of granulated sugar and 7 ½ quarts of egg whites. When it’s done, she pours it in a 60-quart Hobart mixer bowl — that’s the size of three 5-gallon buckets — which fills it about one-third of the way.

She turns it on the second speed and starts whisking.

“It takes about 25, maybe 30 minutes and when it’s done, it fills this entire thing,” she said. “It’s full to the very top.”

She knows it’s done with a quick tap of her finger.

“You want it good and stiff. I can touch it and tell when it’s ready.”

Then she adds 40 pounds of cold butter, bit by bit, increasing the speed along the way.

When it’s all added, it’s done. If she needs chocolate buttercream, she’ll take out enough and flavor it separately.

“This is my base,” she said. “I add flavor as needed. And that mixer? It was here when I got here and I’ve never known it to break down.”

Of course the buttercream goes on cakes, but its highest purpose, well, that’s as the filling for the petit fours.

Bennett gets a half-sheet white cake from White and his crew and slices through the middle. She brushes on vanilla simple syrup or maybe Grand Marnier, whichever, then spreads on a layer of buttercream, nestles the layers back together, and cuts 63 1 ½-inch square cakes from the big cake — 9 cuts down the long side, 7 across.

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Those are moved to a rack and glazed, not once and not three times. Twice.

“We’ve learned all this. Two times is the perfect amount,” she said.

Same with the size. They’ve been bigger and they’ve been smaller, but unless you put in a special order asking otherwise, your petit fours are 1 ½-inch squares.

“If they’re smaller, they fall over, and some people don’t want them bigger because you want something easy to hold,” she said. “We decided a long time ago that 1 ½ inches is just right.”

By noon, when most of the crowd arrived for lunch, the bread had been long baked — Rasasack starts at midnight — and the pastry crew was close to done.

“We’re the morning crew,” White said. “We come in after the overnight crew bakes the bread and we do the cakes, the tarts, all the pastry.”

He worked at La Baguette for 15 years, left for Sam’s Town, where he was the pastry chef for 22 years, and returned to La Baguette two years ago.

Liz Jackson, who makes the pimento cheese, the chicken salad and the soups, has been there 34 years.

And Abby Wilkerson, the new general manager, just started but fits right in.

“We have everyone here except maybe two people,” she said. “Everyone knows exactly what they’re doing. They’re great.”

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Cousins Judd Tashie and David Tashie bought the bakery in March and closed it down to finish some renovations for about a month before reopening this week.

There’s more to come. The dining room is getting a complete redo and a bar is being added. When it’s finished and more staff is hired, the bistro will be open for dinner.

Judd Tashie was in the bakery on Wednesday and said there’s another thing coming, too:

“We’re going to put in a request box,” he said. “One thing is clear, these people who have been coming in here all these years know what they want, and the people here know how to make it. They just need to let us know what it is.”

During the renovation, he said he came across dozens of recipes.

“I don’t even know what some of it is because they had French names, but there are recipes for everything from cakes to pastries to hot items. We’ll find a way to start reintroducing those and see what people like.

“I think there’s going to be some real nostalgia eating when people rediscover these things.”

La Baguette, 3088 Poplar Avenue, is open 7 a.m.-3 p.m. Monday through Friday and 8 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Call 901-458-0900.