Honey & Lace Baking Co in Ellsworth

Dec 3

Honey & Lace Baking Co. began with a confession: owner Kara van Emmerik used to hate baking.

“I was horrible at it,” she says. “In culinary school I could not make a pie crust to save my life, and it made me so angry. It was only three ingredients. I thought, why can’t I be good at this?”

A lifelong line cook and restaurant pro, Kara ran kitchens in her younger years before taking a job teaching culinary arts at Eastern Maine Community College in 2015. Teaching sharpened her technical skills, but it also revealed something else. She is stubborn in the best way. If she is bad at something, she wants to master it. Baking became that challenge.

At the same time she noticed something practical. For years, baking ingredients were relatively affordable, and there was room to build a business by transforming simple components into beautiful, thoughtful desserts. “I am pretty business minded,” she says. “I loved the idea of using basic ingredients to create really elegant things and sell them for more.”

In 2019, just as the pandemic was beginning to loom, Kara decided to license her home kitchen in Sedgwick, where she grew up. Maine’s early cottage food laws made it possible. She worked with the Department of Agriculture to get Honey & Lace off the ground and quickly realized how freeing it felt not to be tied to a storefront.

During COVID she met customers in parking lots and sold pastries out of the trunk of her car. “It felt like illicit activity,” she jokes. “We were all meeting in lots for baked goods.” She liked the mobility and direct connection, and she has held onto that model ever since. Today, she works out of a commercial kitchen inside Black Moon Public House in Ellsworth, which gives her more space and flexibility while still allowing her to “go where the market is instead of waiting for it to come to me.”

The name Honey & Lace reflects how she wants her work to feel. Honey is the sweetness. Lace is the elegance. “I think visually first,” she explains. “I never doubt that my food will taste good, but I want the first reaction to be, wow, that is art.”

There is no static menu. Kara bakes bagels for Maker’s Market in Sedgwick, gluten free pastries for Pugnuts in Surry, and pastries and breads for wholesale partners in the busy season. Most of her business, though, is completely custom. Wedding cakes, celebration cakes, French macarons, pies, and now whoopie pies, which won Best Traditional Whoopie Pie at the Maine Whoopie Pie Festival in Dover-Foxcroft.

Her favorite projects are the ones that feel like true collaboration. A recent client sent an email filled with movie stills, architecture photos, and colors that she loved, and asked Kara to “embody this” in cake form. “Give me that and I will make you the most beautiful thing you have ever seen,” Kara says.

Despite the sweets, she jokes that she is a “salty snack person” who does not actually like dessert. Her father is a dentist, so she grew up with very few treats and now channels that complicated relationship with sugar into precision and restraint. She taste tests, then steps back.

What she cares about most is the relationship behind each order. The couple whose wedding cake she baked later called her for their gender reveal cake, baby shower cake, and their child’s first birthday. “That felt really full circle to me,” she says. “Everything you see from Honey & Lace is something we created together.”

FAMOUS FOR:
Her handmade bagels, her award winning traditional whoopie pies, her meticulous French macarons, and the custom wedding cakes.

ADDRESS:
142 Main St in Ellsworth, ME

WEBSITE:
honeyandlacebaking.com