Placing an order with the Interrupted Baker is a bit like trying to get tickets for a Beyoncé concert. Within minutes of baker Stacy Kiley sending out her Thursday-evening text message with an ordering link, all the pastries on offer that week—confections like Dirty Boba Soufflé Cake, Biscoff brioche buns, and ube cookie choux—are in online carts and dozens of people sit on the virtual wait list.
When the lucky few show up to claim their treats on Saturday morning, they go to the parking lot of a brewery in North Austin, where Kiley hands out the coveted boxes of pastries from either the Con Todo taco truck or the trunk of her car.
Kiley is one of a growing number of home bakers who run their businesses through social media, particularly Instagram. The trend, which flourished during the height of the COVID pandemic, features both self-taught and more classically trained bakers offering elaborately decorated cakes and uniquely flavored treats, usually made entirely in their home kitchens.
These businesses are enabled by a 2013 “cottage law” that allows home bakers in Texas to sell their wares with less oversight than restaurants or food trucks are subject to, albeit with other limitations. Under the law, cottage bakers can’t use more heavily regulated ingredients, such as meat, and there is a limit of $50,000 in annual revenue.
As with everything else on Instagram, scoring a highly coveted, limited-run pastry box can be a form of social currency, encouraging envy from followers who must wait for the next drop.
It can be a workable business model for savvy bakers. “Since the beginning, I told myself to treat this like a job,” said Houston-area pastry chef Ally Barrera, of Sweet Bee Bakehouse. She started her business in 2020, after her employer at a wholesale bakery reduced her wages.
She decided to focus on croissants, which she’d learned to make at lauded bakery Bachour, in Miami, and weren’t readily available in her home base of Pearland. “Think of all the different desserts you’ve ever had in your life, and turn that into a croissant,” she said of her flavors, which range from Boston cream pie to arroz con leche. “There’s so many things you can do.” However, croissants are labor-intensive, and she needed to supplement them with easier-to-make goods, such as cookies. She now hosts a bake sale from her house every Saturday, using Instagram to advertise the weekly menu and the preordering link. The bake sale accounts for around 70 percent of her business, and orders for custom-decorated cakes make up the rest.
Although Barrera has done pop-ups, the logistics of transporting products and signage are arduous. Farmers markets similarly require creating and advertising a booth and paying fees. Barrera finds that Instagram is the best way to grow her business. “It’s natural for me to post on Instagram,” she said. “People buy once, they post it on Instagram, then someone else finds my page.” She still wants to open a physical shop but needs to build up capital.
None of the bakers interviewed for this story use commercial kitchens, citing cost concerns (kitchen use can start at around $500 for a package of twenty hours per month). In Barrera’s case, she likely would have still needed her own specialty equipment, such as a dough sheeter and a proofing box. “I didn’t have money to build out a kitchen, so we bootstrapped these things over time,” she said of her current workspace, the breakfast nook of her house.
Barrera estimates she works fifty hours a week on Sweet Bee, including the time spent sourcing and budgeting ingredients, developing recipes, and prepping components of a dozen different baked goods every week. On bake sale days, she starts work at 3:30 a.m. to have everything filled, glazed, and packaged for the first pickups, at 10 a.m. With this model and around thirty customers weekly, she generates an income on par with what she made in some of her pastry-chef jobs. “I like making my own schedule and being my own boss,” she said.
Kiley spends five hours a day preparing and testing recipes for the Interrupted Baker, even with three daughters clamoring for her attention (hence the name of her bakery). Despite her technically complex creations, she is entirely self-taught, gleaning techniques from YouTube and trial and error. “I started sharing my food on Instagram just for fun,” she said. “But then people would tell me they liked my pictures, and I thought maybe I could do this as a part-time job.”
She started by selling custom-decorated cookies and cakes but found it unsatisfying. “I was doing what other people wanted, not what I wanted to eat,” she said. “I missed a lot of desserts in Taiwan [where Kiley grew up], so I found a way to make them.” She started posting her own creations and got a trickle of orders via direct message. The turning point was when she first made rolls with ube, a Philippine tuber similar to the sweet potato, which had become trendy for its purple color. After that, posts about her Japanese cheesecakes were what made the orders pour in.
What started as a way for Kiley to make extra money has turned into a more intensive operation—she’s navigating a family emergency that has forced her to accelerate plans to expand her business. “My baking is not optional for me anymore. I do presales because I can’t afford to waste my time and money to bake and then not sell out,” she said. “Eventually, I need to be able to provide for myself and my kids.” She hopes to open a small shop, although she worries the details that make her pastries special might be lost if she hires other bakers or tries to scale up.
Not every Instagram bakery respresents a full-time job. The Pandesal Place, based in Allen, started as a pandemic passion project of Jennifer Dural and her daughters, Julia and Rafaela. Jennifer, who’s an engineer by day, had studied bread making in the Philippines, so the trio decided to focus on two varieties of fluffy, slightly sweet pandesal bread, both plain and ube-flavored. “My mom tried ube pandesal, and she didn’t really get it,” explained Julia. “But then [ube] got popular during quarantine, [and] she was like, ‘You know what, let me try making this.’ ” Rafaela created social media profiles and posted in a couple of local online groups about their efforts.
Playing to popularity paid off—the family made one hundred pieces of bread for the first round of online orders, but the second round required thousands. “All of our kitchen was taken over by bread,” Julia recalled. The Durals scrambled to get the necessary ingredients in a time of reduced imports. “There might have been a shortage of ube in Dallas, and that would have been because of us,” Julia said, laughing. “We were literally going to, like, every Asian grocery store in Dallas, clearing their shelves of ube.”
The Pandesal Place has since expanded its offerings to leche flan and holiday cakes, sold via preorders out of the family home and in the occasional open-air market. Although the family aspires to open a shop someday, baking is not a main source of income (Julia is a lawyer, and Rafaela works in marketing), and the bakery’s fluid schedule reflects that. “We’re not in a regular cadence lately,” Julia said. “There are more places to get Filipino bread now. Sometimes I wonder if people forgot about us.” But when the Durals open up online ordering, they still sell out.
While success may look different for each business, there is precedent for expansion. Austin’s Comadre Panadería started selling its pastries on Instagram during the pandemic. Now it’s housed in a small cafe and has earned two James Beard Foundation Award nominations. Having an Instagram-based bakery provides bakers with an avenue for minimizing costs and red tape while doing something they love. “I don’t have a business background. I like creating,” Barrera said. “I don’t want to grow the bakery and hate it. I want to grow and love it still.”
