For almost two years, micro-bakery Honey Bee Baking Co. has been quietly making a name for itself with small-batch sweets sold through local pop-ups and special orders. But this Friday, Jan. 10, doors open on an official storefront in Port Allen. The tidy shop, 5 miles from downtown Baton Rouge, will sell Honey Bee’s seasonal king cakes, oversized cupcakes, cinnamon rolls, blondies, scones, plump cookies in festive flavors and more. It will be open only on Fridays at first.
“I’ve always loved to bake,” says founder Kait Culy, a Michigan native who relocated to greater Baton Rouge 10 years ago for a job in chemical manufacturing. “Even as a little girl, I wanted everything with sprinkles.”
Honey Bee is part of growing network of cottage bakers across the Capital Region. Dozens have cropped up in the last few years, selling signature specialty goods through pop-ups, farmers markets, community events and front porch pick-ups. Culy says she outgrew her home-based business and decided to open a brick-and-mortar location to keep up with demand.
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The 1,200-square-foot retail space on bustling Highway 1 holds a cheery retail counter chock-full of Culy’s goodies, and a commercial kitchen outfitted with convection ovens, industrial mixers and plenty of workspace. In the near future, Culy hopes to offer the kitchen to fellow micro-bakers experiencing growing pains. In fact, that’s why the sign above the store reads Ghost Pepper Culinary Collective, a glimpse of what’s to come.
For now, however, Culy is focused on manning Honey Bee’s store. She’ll also continue to fill orders for a robust list of local businesses and loyal customers. For example, she recently made 1,600 individually wrapped cookies for a corporate client, and shoppers will find her king cakes at Sweet Baton Rouge on Fridays during Carnival season.
The vibe inside the new bakery is decidedly vintage, decked out in periwinkle and azure with accents of blush and gold. Culy and her husband finished some of the handiwork themselves, but mostly relied on small businesses from West Baton Rouge Parish, she says.
“I wanted to keep everything local,” Culy says. “I’m part of the West Baton Rouge Chamber of Commerce, and I’m a big proponent of that. The community has done a lot to support me. It only works if we all support each other.”
Her baking style is comforting and approachable, while still being on trend. King cakes are made with a dough recipe Culy created herself that uses vanilla extract and Vietnamese cinnamon. Her behemoth cupcakes, called baby cakes, come in flavors like gummy worm-topped dirt cake, cookies and cream, and strawberry wedding cake, which features a punchy frosting made with freeze-dried strawberries.
The speculoos cookie trend sweeping the country appears in her addictive Biscoff blondies, tender squares with a hint of crunch and redolent with caramel and warm spices. As for cookies, Culy meets Baton Rouge’s demand for cakey, oversized mounds in creative formats like brown butter chocolate chip, cinnamon toast snickerdoodle, chocolate chip Nutella and party animal, made with crushed Golden Oreos and topped with pink and white circus animal cookies.
Culy couldn’t have predicted her career path would lead to full-time baking. After the birth of her first child in 2021, she says she experienced postpartum depression and took extra time off work from her job in chemical manufacturing. She found solace in the act of baking, its precision requiring the same skills that had originally drawn her to the field of science. It was a delicious escape. But while preparing the perfect chocolate chip cookie helped her feel strong enough to return to work, Culy quickly realized she didn’t want to go back. A new pursuit was calling.
“I was really good at my job, but it just wasn’t making me happy,” she says.
She dove into baking full-time in 2022, and leveled up her skills with constant trial and error, along with a few leisure classes at the Louisiana Culinary Institute. Equipped with a bachelor’s degree in ecology and a master’s degree in public health and industrial hygiene, Culy’s science mind helped her bring a natural curiosity to baking’s principles.
“I wanted to understand the whys of what I was doing,” she says, pointing to a shelf of cookbooks in the shop she says she studied ferociously. “I weigh every single ingredient.”
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Case in point: Each chocolate chip Nutella cookie gets exactly 30 grams of Nutella piped inside.
“I didn’t want to just do it,” Culy continues. “I wanted to be really good at it.”
Honey Bee Baking Co.’s grand opening is Friday, Jan. 10, from noon to 6 p.m. at 4169 Highway 1 S. in Port Allen. The store will be open Fridays from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.