Does Central Kentucky’s best croissant come out of this old jewelry store?
Danielle King fondly remembers a trip she took 20 years ago to Paris with her mother to celebrate her 50th birthday.
The two of them made plenty of memories and while they did take in the sights, they also took in the scents and the flavors – more specifically, what turned out to be a life-changing chocolate croissant from a bakery on a side street near the Louvre Museum.
“You know that feeling when you have when you try one of those things that make you go, Oh my God, I have to learn how to make that,” King said. “It sort of opened my eyes to how other people get to experience really amazing food.”
It was enough of a feeling that led to King becoming the co-owner and co-founder of Spoonful of Sugar, Sweets and Such, a bakery and restaurant giving Mt. Sterling residents a different kind of breakfast and lunch experience.
The idea for Spoonful of Sugar wasn’t conceived in a kitchen. Rather, it took shape when King, a physician of internal medicine at the Mt. Sterling Clinic, would strike up cooking conversations during lunch breaks with Donna Cassidy, the clinic’s office manager.
King had already purchased a distinctive, historic downtown location, renovating the old Little’s Jewelry building on W. Main St. In fact the Little Jewelry’s original neon sign still adorns the bakery’s exterior.
“I just wanted to restore the building and once it got restored, I started thinking, we really need something to help our town,” King said.
Said Cassidy, “I always loved to bake and Danielle, in her mind, she loves dough and working with dough. She decided she wanted to open a bakery and just kept trying to convince me to help her with that. I finally caved in and the rest is history.”
The croissants
King and Cassidy wanted to know what they were doing so they took three different trips to New York City to take intensive courses at the then-named French Culinary Institute, now the International Culinary Center.
There they learned to make the different types of dough and the techniques for French-style pastries, from the scones with made-from-scratch cheese and fruit filling to the laminating of 25 layers of butter and dough that goes into their croissants.
“It’s the layers. When you cut through a croissant, you should see individual layers. It should look like a loaf of bread,” King said. “Now, we have people that come in and taste the croissants and they say, ‘I haven’t had anything taste like this since I’ve been to Europe.’”
At first, one day a week
An artisan, nut-free bakery and pastry shop wasn’t something the city of Mt. Sterling was used to having when it opened in 2012, but they certainly seemed to embrace it.
King and Cassidy started off opening one day a week, baking all night Wednesday, selling out of their pastries and baguettes the following Thursday and repeating that process each week – while keeping their day jobs at the clinic.
The passion project eventually became successful enough to become a full-fledged business, opening five days a week during breakfast and lunch hours, and hiring Chef Stephen Powell, originally from Frenchburg and graduate of the New England Culinary Institute in Vermont, to come on full-time in 2014.
With expanded hours, Spoonful of Sugar also expanded both its square-footage and its menu offerings. The same year they hired Powell, they purchased the sister building to accommodate more customers. The additional seating also incorporates some of the building’s history in its decor. Some of it, like the hardwood floors and tin ceilings, were already in place. Others were recovered, refinished and repurposed, like the dining tables made out of the jewelry store doors found upstairs or windows found in the basement that adorn the bakery’s walls.
The reaction has been positive with 5-star ratings online from Facebook, Yelp and Tripadvisor.
Now more offerings
Spoonful of Sugar’s menu has coffee, espresso and lattes (coffee courtesy of Creative Coffees in nearby Winchester) to pair with its pastries, muffins and popular scones, cinnamon rolls and meringue pies. They also occasionally bake cookies and are venturing more into doing specialty cakes.
But the bakery isn’t just a sweet tooth stop. It now features some savory items for lunch like soups, sandwiches, wraps and other baked creations prepared with the same amount of freshness and attention to detail, like its chicken pot pie or whatever quiche they are offering that day.
“Having stuff come straight out of the oven, you know what went into it,” Powell said. “We try to keep our ingredients as pure as possible and as good a quality as possible. There’s those who appreciate that and we hope to find more of those folks.”
King and Cassidy both said there are layers to what Spoonful of Sugar does. While the obvious part may be scratching the co-owners culinary itch or offering a bit more refined breakfast or lunch experience for small-town customers, they said they get just as much fulfillment out of helping stimulate the local economy and bringing the Mt. Sterling residents back to Main Street.
“It’s the sense of community,” Cassidy said. “The best part is just being a part of the community and having people look forward to coming to see us.”
Said King, “Mt. Sterling has a lot of amazing friendly people. They are always supportive. They always try to support the new guy on the street and they appreciate the amazing food that we offer. We’ve sort of stuck with our original plan. We’ve kept up our end of the deal as far as the quality and I think that keeps the customers coming back.”
Spoonful of Sugar, Sweets and Such
Where: 18 W. Main St., Mt. Sterling
Hours: 7 a.m.-3 p.m. Tue-Fri; 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Sat.
Contact: 859-497-1955 or visit Spoonfulofsugarsweetsandsuch.com/
This story was originally published January 2, 2020 at 10:45 AM with the headline "Does Central Kentucky’s best croissant come out of this old jewelry store?."