She can’t have her “cakelette” — and name it, too.

Olenka Bazowski, co-owner of Sweet Olenka’s bakery, is heartbroken she had to change the name of her signature confection from “cakelette” to “cakester.”

It’s all because Dufflet Pastries, one of the city’s largest and best-known bakeries, sent her a cease and desist letter late last fall, demanding she stop “selling, offering for sale, disturbing, advertising or in any manner using” anything with the patisserie giant’s trademarked term.

If Sweet Olenka’s failed to comply, the letter said, Dufflet would take “whatever legal action is necessary.”

Bazowski, 36, who co-owns two locations of Sweet Olenka’s along with husband Ray Bazowski, says she can’t afford to fight Dufflet over this cake naming issue, even though she feels the term — Dufflet spells it “cakelet” — belongs to her.

She started selling her version of the cakelette in 2006, she says, when Sweet Olenka’s first store opened on Lakeshore Blvd W. in Etobicoke. They cakelettes have been a top seller for more than nine years at both locations — the Queen St. W outlet opened last year just down the street from one of Dufflet’s three GTA outposts.

Slightly larger than the standard cupcake, but much smaller than a traditional 8-inch cake (which feeds 10 to 12 people) a single Sweet Olenka’s “cakester” feeds one hungry person.

Served in a crisp, parchment paper cup, it comes in a variety of ever-changing flavours, such as strawberry cream and maple pecan salted caramel. Each round confection is decorated with icing and studded with chocolate truffles.

Bazowski places hand-written labels, bearing the names of her confections, in the glass fridges where they’re kept. Sometimes, she scribbles the names on the glass itself.

She decided to call them “cakelettes” many years ago because she felt adding “lette,” a French-sounding suffix, to the end of “cake” would denote something little or “smaller than.”

Cupcakes were a huge trend back then and Bazowski wanted to define herself — and her confection. Neither Dufflet nor any of its products, she says, ever entered into her mind.

“It was a no-brainer,” Bazowski says, of the name. “It’s a generic term.”

Dufflet Rosenberg disagrees.

The founder and partner of Dufflet Pastries, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, says her “cakelet,” has become synonymous with her brand.

Her customers “recognize” the rectangular confection, which comes in 12 flavours including carrot cake and chocolate, even gluten free. And they ask for it by name.

“They say how much they love that cake…the size is perfect, we don’t want a big cake anymore we want a small cake.”

Rosenberg coined the term “cakelet” in 1998 to describe her confection, which feeds four to six people.

It was “a natural” choice for a name, she says, not only because it denotes a smaller cake, but because it is also a play on her own name.

Nicknamed Dufflet because she is a smaller version of her older brother, who is nicknamed Duff, Rosenberg added “let” to “cake” because these confections were smaller than some of her other products.

After almost a decade of making cakelets, Dufflet Pastries finally got around to registering the term — along with other similar words including “gatelet” and “cuplet” — with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office in 2007.

The trademark process went through without a hitch, Rosenberg says, and unchallenged.

A food entrepreneur who started out small just like Sweet Olenka’s, Rosenberg knows first-hand how easy it is to breach trademark rules unintentionally.

At the start of her career, she herself made a naming mistake, calling one of her creations “snickers,” after the well-known candy bar. She quickly learned that was against the rules. “I was naïve,” she says. “I didn’t know.”

Bakers are more savvy today, Rosenberg believes. She won’t name names, but says large grocery stores as well as independent bakeries have cooperated amicably when Dufflet has asked them to stop using the term.

She was surprised to get pushback from Sweet Olenka’s.

After a Dufflet employee out for ice cream spotted the “cakelettes” at Sweet Olenka’s Queen St. W. store last fall, Daniele Bertrand, president of Dufflet Group Inc., wrote the Bazowskis an e-mail. “I am hoping that you understand our concern,” he wrote, and will agree to stop using the term.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Ray Bazowski replied that “‘cakelette’ is in common usage” and suggested it can’t be trademarked in the first place. He asked for a “face-to-face” meeting.

But, according to emails, Bertrand didn’t see the point of belaboring the issue.

“We’re not preventing them from being successful in their own business,” Rosenberg says. “We certainly support them. All we’re doing is protecting our trademark.”

And they have every right to do so, says intellectual property lawyer Mala Joshi.

Still, she says, that doesn’t protect the trademark holder, in this case Dufflet Pastries, from having to battle legal challenges.

Sweet Olenka’s might just have a case, says Ariel Katz, an intellectual property expert and associate professor at University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law.

These days, a “cakelet” — the spelling doesn’t matter because the word sounds the same — could be defined as a “small cake,” he says, which is what consumers may understand it to be.

“There’s a strong argument to make,” he says, that “cakelet” is a “clearly descriptive” term.

It may not have been when Dufflet started using it, or even when the company registered the term eight years ago. But, like “thermos” and “yellow pages,” once distinctive words; they have been found, in the United States, to be generic. Likewise, the meaning of “cakelet,” Katz says, may have also evolved.

“Language is a dynamic thing,” he says. “It develops all the time; meanings change.”

A quick Google search yields hundreds of items, including pans and small tarts, named and described as cakelets and cakelettes — even a Thornhill bakery calls itself Cakelette Bakeshop.

If Bazowski wants to use the term Cakelet by either spelling, instead of Cakester, she would to have to take legal action against Dufflet. She would have to present evidence that when customers hear the word “cakelet” they don’t think of the manufacturer (Dufflet), rather the product (“small cake”).

That could be costly.

She doesn’t have the money — a $10,000 retainer — to spend on lawyers, she says, and doesn’t “want the stress.”

Bazowski says she’s coming to terms with the situation.

Especially, she says, because her small cakes, by their new name, taste just as sweet.