2020 Introduction!

Welcome to the New Year and the New Decade! It’s both exciting and rather anticlimactic, isn’t it?!

For those of you who are new to the blog and the bakery, I wanted to introduce myself, and also give you some idea of the direction the Accidental Bakery is going in 2020.

First, my name is Jennings, and I am a completely self-taught baker — and I have celiac disease! My story started when my husband and I bought a hotel in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua, in late 2015.

When we moved there, I started baking muffins, rolls, and eventually cinnamon rolls, scones, and donuts for the guests as part of their breakfast. Word spread, and a coffee shop/surf shop in town asked me if I’d bake for them. I told my husband that I “apparently accidentally had a bakery”… and a business was born!

We moved back from Nicaragua in late 2016 due to some health issues, and, not knowing what else to do, I started doing pop up shops at a local boutique. I “trained” by watching The Great British Baking Show, Bakers vs Fakers, the Holiday Baking Championship, and any other baking show I could find. By Christmas, I’d outgrown my house, so we got a space that was just going to be a kitchen. Before you know it, I was open 1 day a week, then 2, then 3, then had employees and were open 5 days a week, and doing the local farmers market in Beaufort weekly.

By Thanksgiving, I had a bigger kitchen, a full coffee shop/bakery, and a very enthusiastic customer base. We went on that way until Hurricane Florence devastated the Crystal Coast area in September, 2018. Many things changed after that. I closed the shop side of the business after our last Harry Potter Halloween, and didn’t bake after the holidays until the market started back up in April.

Olde Beaufort Farmers Market

However, by then, my husband’s business had moved us back to Raleigh, and I was “communting” 2.5 hours each way for several days a week — or even staying for weeks at a time. It wasn’t sustainable, so I dropped the baked goods and just made our super popular (and addictive!) Outer Banks Granola.

And then there was burnout…

It happens! And honestly, the granola really needed to go to the next level and I knew I wasn’t the person to do it. So we have now sold Outer Banks Granola, and (a little to my surprise) I’ve begun baking again as a home bakery.

And that’s where we are now! I took some time off when my almost 7 week old grandson was born in November, and of course the holidays came. But now I’ll be offering baked goods to the Raleigh area, sometimes to the Beaufort area (if I am traveling), and some items can be shipped.

We’ve got a Facebook and Instagram page where you can follow along, and some exciting developments coming for 2020 as far as fun educational things go. One of the best things I did at the bakery was hands-on classes, and I’m designing some things to get that aspect back on the agenda.

So that’s got you all caught up! I’m planning to have fun with the Community that’s part of the Facebook page, as well as this blog and some Stories on Instagram. I do have some traveling in the calendar over the next few months, but I think we’ll be having a good time!

Also, my daughter and I have restarted a blog we did every day (EVERY.SINGLE.DAY.) in 2015 called 365 Days of Pinterest Recipes. We’ve got a Facebook page and Instagram account for that, too, if you’d like to follow along!