If there’s one thing Emma Plummer dislikes, it’s using an ineffective tool. As a pastry chef, she hates to see people butcher a freshly baked loaf of her sourdough bread trying to slice it with the wrong knife. It’s best to use the right tool for the job in the first place.
“There’s nothing more offensive than mauling your freshly baked sourdough trying to cut it with a dull knife,” Plummer said. However, bread is not the beginning of this story. It started with macarons.
Plummer is the secret ingredient behind Butter & Whisk, a cottage bakery set within the four walls of her home. Here’s how it works: Customers order online on Friday morning at butterandwhisk.me. While they’re ordering, she’s already baking. Then, customers pick up their order at 10 a.m. on Friday or Saturday at her home. It’s possible to also catch her at local farmers markets. If she’s going, she lists it on her website.
The business began with macarons — hundreds and hundreds of macarons that come in all manner of flavors and colors. It’s a business she’s built throughout the last five years with a couple of interruptions to have children and nearly meet a COVID death. Even with those breaks, she has built a rather large menu of macaron flavors.
“Over the course of those five years I’ve created a huge flavor menu with macarons,” Plummer said. She isn’t lying. There’s cake batter, hot Cheetos or mango tajin, to name just three. For the unadventurous, there’s the usual vanilla bean, fresh raspberry or lemon.
She finds inspiration for new flavor profiles everywhere.
“I’ll go on grocery shopping trips by myself and I’ll just wander up and down the aisles for inspiration,” Plummer said. “I scroll Pinterest and I have lots of baking buddies and we all share inspiration with each other.”
Plummer fell into the macaron business. She loved baking and thought macarons would be an interesting challenge. She quickly noticed they were finicky little buggers, but she kept at it. The duds filled her freezer until one day her husband told her they no longer had room for regular food. To empty the freezer, she advertised on Facebook to family and friends that she had some cookies to unload. The business took off. Now baking is her full time job, which suits her because she has been able to stay home with her young children.
Plummer has always been interested in baking. She learned in middle school. “My mom taught me to cook but she didn’t like to bake so I taught myself to bake,” Plummer said. “I was always the one to bring cookies or brownies to all of my events that I went to through middle school and high school. I’ve always really enjoyed it and it stuck throughout the years.”
Prices are in line with other macaron outlets — $33 a dozen. Then there are the fancy orders. Customers may order, for example, a 10-tier macaron tower, about 75 of the cookies, beginning at $225. Think pyramid shape for that one. Macarons may also be “painted” with numbers or letters, too. That runs $45 for a minimum of a dozen; only one letter or number may be used per batch.
In August, Plummer added a new line of products, beginning with a sourdough starter and ending with a fragrant loaf of bread or sweet rolls, and even cookies.
Never heard of a sourdough cookie? It’s not a common item, but that doesn’t mean it’s not interesting. “When I started doing sourdough, I wanted to create a menu that was similar to my large flavor menu of macarons,” Plummer said, “So, I’m doing a different flavor of sourdough bread every month and a different flavor of cinnamon roll-style treat. We’re about to introduce a lemon-blueberry roll that looks like a cinnamon roll but it’s lemon-blueberry. The same for cookies. I want to do a new style of cookies that’s long fermented. It gives it just a little bit of extra flavor which everybody seems to really like.”
The sourdough part of the business has its roots in a very scary time for Plummer and her family, a time she wasn’t sure she would live. It began when someone asked her if she could do sourdough. No, she said, she could not keep a starter alive.
“Later in the year (of 2021) I got COVID and I had a long hospital stay,” Plummer said. “I had it real bad. I spent six weeks on the ventilator.” Plummer was pregnant when she entered the hospital. A few days later, doctors induced labor so she could deliver a healthy daughter, but staff told her husband Plummer herself wasn’t going to make it.
“I’m so lucky, so blessed that I got to come off the ventilator because I know that was rare,” Plummer said. “I had a lot of my nurses say I was the first COVID patient to come off the ventilator and live.” She walked out of the hospital. Even so, the COVID journey did not end there.
“I had to relearn how to walk and talk and all of those things,” Plummer added. “I needed a lot of physical therapy and a lot of occupational therapy.” When she finally got home from the hospital a friend gifted her a sourdough starter. She managed to keep it alive.
“(Baking sourdough bread) was my occupational therapy and I really enjoyed doing it,” Plummer said. “My husband helped me work through the first couple of loaves because I didn’t have enough strength to stand up in the kitchen for too long.”
After a while, sourdough bread migrated to the menu, where it has been a popular item. Plummer sells about 50 loaves a week, but can turn out 100 if needed. “A lot more than we were ever anticipating,” she said.
Plummer credits the people of Tucson with her success; she truly believes it’s this city and the people who live here that have made her life as she knows it possible. “I’m so thankful for Tucson,” Plummer said. “It’s the best place to start a business. It really is. I could not be more grateful for Tucson giving me the ability to stay home with my kids and follow my dream of owning a bakery.”
Butter and Whisk
www.butterandwhisk.me
