Former Beaverdale resident Steven Gdula moved to the West Coast, wrote a cookbook and started a business that focused on a Johnstown staple: The Gob.

Gdula, 48, a freelance writer living in San Francisco, said the last thing he ever imagined doing was starting a baking business.

He is a writer by profession and had success with the first of his three books, “The Warmest Room in the House: How the Kitchen Became the Heart of the Twentieth-Century American Home” published by Bloomsbury in 2007.

Gdula graduated from Penn State and worked in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., before heading West.

He is the son of  Helen (Jeremias) Gdula of Richland Township and the late Peter E. Gdula.

Growing up, he was surrounded by gobs – two round cakes sandwiching fluffy icing – that are said to have been nicknamed after the bony dumps at coal mines, where miners packed them in their lunch buckets.

The name Gobs is a trademark owned by the Dutch Maid Bakery in Johnstown.

In 2008, he found himself in San Francisco and out of work.

He was missing home, and missing gobs, so he made some.

“I thought everyone grew up eating some sort of food specific to their cultural heritage,” Gdula said. “And I also thought everyone grew up eating gobs.

“I had no clue what a whoopie pie was until I was out of college.”

He said that, although the whoopie pie is good, the gob is better.

Gdula  started his business when he was having trouble getting writing assignments in 2008 and 2009 after relocating to San Francisco.

Inspired by the growing street food-cart scene in the Mission District, Gdula decided to make gobs and try to sell them.

“People had never seen them because there’s nary a gob in California,” Gdula said.

He offered the traditional chocolate cake and vanilla icing, but with a twist. He used equal amounts of lemon juice, sour cream and vanilla extract in his vanilla frosting to give it a matchless tang.

”People loved them, and they would often ask me if I had any more of those ‘sugar sandwiches,’ ” Gdula said.

He called his business Gobba Gobba Hey and took the venture to a new level by offering organic gobs in such flavors as orange cardamom ginger with saffron, matcha green tea with lemongrass, strawberry basil “shortcake” and pumpkin with buttered rum frosting.

Gdula said the street food scene in San Francisco was tremendous during 2009-10.

“I started selling on a street corner in the Mission District, and then, before too long, there were several similar vendors, like myself, selling things from creme brulee to Filipino food to barbecue or bacon potato chips to curry,” he said.

“We were all nontraditional vendors selling traditional foods – foods that played a big part in our individual cultural backgrounds.”

He also sold at vendor sponsored events and local businesses started asking him and the others to sell at various festivals or parties.

Gdula participated in the Eat Real Festival in Oakland every year and also in the San Francisco Street Food Festival. He began selling online through Foodzie.com, offering special boxes for the holidays, such as The Twelve Gobs of Christmas.

He routinely was asked to bake for events held by large tech companies in the Bay Area, which helped to keep the business afloat.

Unfortunately, Gdula decided to cease operation on Dec. 14.

Part of the reason the business folded is because Gdula couldn’t keep up with demand.

 “I never did hire anyone, and since I insisted on making every gob by hand, it could sometimes take me close to three hours to start a batch at my commercial kitchen space, bake them, make the frosting, frost them, let them sit, and then finally heat seal them in bags,” he said.

“The business paid for itself eventually, but that was about it.”

He never intended to write a cookbook, but he had amassed a decent recipe file within six months of selling gobs on the streets of San Francisco, he said.

His “Gobba Gobba Hey: A Gob Cookbook” (Bloomsbury, $18), was released Aug. 31 and features 52 recipes.

“I developed so many different kinds of gobs because people began expecting a new flavor each week,” Gdula said.

The cookbook is available online and at Barnes & Noble.

“I like to think my book gives readers some humor, some food history, and maybe even exposes them to some flavor combinations they might not have considered before,” Gdula said.

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