On the day that Edible Art Specialty Cakes & Cookies marked a milestone, Mykayla Fontaine greeted customers and offered them a customized anniversary cake bar.
Visitors were invited to choose the flavor of cake — vanilla, chocolate, wedding cake or blueberry. Then, select the icing — vanilla, chocolate, Oreo, cream cheese or lemon. Toppings were available, too.
Mykayla is the daughter of Edible Art founder Debbie Fontaine. As people were dropping in to the business on South Street in Longview for free cake in celebration of the bakery’s 20th anniversary, Debbie was a little ways down the street working on her ongoing project to restore the historical Utzman Farm House.
Mykayla also is the reason the business exists to start with. Because her mother wasn’t in the bakery at that moment, Mykayla got to share her recollection of the origin story at the party celebrating her mother’s 20th anniversary in business.
“I only ever remember my mom making my birthday cakes,” Mykayla said, and yet, she knows that’s not the whole story.
“I know she bought at least one or two, and she got tired of those places spelling my name wrong,” she recalled.
So, at her first ever real birthday party, the one where people outside her family were invited, Debbie made her daughter’s birthday cake. And make no mistake, this was no cake out of the box. The moms at the party took notice, asking Debbie, “Where did you get this cake?”
Edible Art Specialty Cakes & Cookies owner Debbie Fontaine holds her shop’s free Texas-shaped cookies. (Les Hassell/Longview News-Journal File Photo)
And so a baking star was born, with some help from the past. The recipe for her famous shortbread-like sugar cookies is her great-grandmother’s recipe. Granny Miller, as Casoline Miller was called, used a simple recipe with no icing because she didn’t have money for a lot of ingredients, Debbie said.
“I don’t remember ever going over to her house that she didn’t have these little shortbread sugar cookies. She’d have a little plate of them every time grandkids came over,” Debbie said.
As a teenager, Debbie worked as cake decorator and cleanup worker in Monroe, Louisiana. Later, she went to work at Brookshire Grocery Co. in Tyler, where the bakery manager taught her to decorate cakes after the cake decorator left. She said Tim Brookshire then gave her a full-time job and a scholarship, but when she finished college, she remembers not wanting to return to the bakery
“I thought I was too good for that,” she said.
Instead, she became the first female store manager in the company, she said, and then went to work for Western Merchandise, the company that owned Hastings. She managed the Longview store, where she met her husband, Tim.
From that birthday cake that started it all, Debbie began accepting orders for cookies and cakes that she baked in her home kitchen.
For a young Mykayla, that looked like people coming and going at her home to pick up the treats her mom had baked. It looked like wall-to-wall tables in their living room, filled with cookies and cakes.
And eventually, it looked like a visit from a city health inspector and fines for selling food Debbie made at her home. The state at that time did not have a cottage industry law that allowed people to cook and sell food out of their homes.
Her mother was devastated, Mykayla said, because she couldn’t find a place she could afford to move her business to and also pay the fines she had received.
Mykayla Fontaine decorating cookies as a young girl. (Courtesy Photo)
Debbie and Mykayla recalled her prayer at that time.
Debbie said she asked God for a solution, saying “any answer will do.”
A Realtor she was working with called her one day and told her he had a place for her to look at. It was on the demolition list, he said.
Debbie recalls that when they drove up to the building, the message God sent was obvious. The sign on the building, which was a former bar, read in giant letters “It’ll Do Tavern.”
“I love that it seemed so serendipitous and universal that it all kind of fell in her lap that way,” Mykayla said.
The family cleaned up the building and repaired it.
“I remember helping paint the floor in the back,’ Mykayla said. “I remember when the bathroom was just closet with a door that wouldn’t close all the way.”
Despite its shortcomings, the building provided a way for Debbie, who had been a stay-at-home mom, to continue having time with Mykayla. She’d join her mother at the bakery each day after school. Her mother set her up with a “closet” with a desk and television with a VCR.
When Debbie’s husband was laid off from his job two weeks after the bakery opened, Debbie’s cookies and cakes got the family through that leaner time, with Tim there answering the phone and washing dishes.
“For my mom, this is the story of her business, but for me, this is pretty much where I grew up,” Mykayla said.
Mykayla, who also owns her own publishing company, Fontaine House Publishing, now works at the bakery with her mom. She’s the administrative assistant specialist, helping Debbie and pitching in in other ways at the business. She doesn’t decorate cakes and cookies but does draw pictures of the cakes and cookies people ask for. She also is the IT department, she said.
Longview’s birthday cake, made by Edible Art and adorned with images representing the city’s history, is presented during the Longview Sesquicentennial Ball. (Michael Cavazos/Longview News-Journal File Photo)
When Mykayla turned 27, her mother gave her a card congratulating her for her 22nd anniversary with the business: Her mother gave her $10 once when she was a child for helping ice cookies.
The two Fontaine women work together, but Mykayla says she still misses her mother because they don’t really get to spend time together at work.
She said she believes working together has made them closer.
“Oh my gosh. I love her. My parents are both equally like my best friends,” Mykayla said.
Debbie made Edible Art “Home of the Free Texas Cookie,” where each new customer gets a “bite of the greatest state.” She also designed the cake for Longview’s Sesquicentennial Ball in 2020.
The bakery made it possible for Debbie to never have to put her daughter in daycare, to be with her at the end of each school day. It allowed her to put her daughter first and her job second. It was a great joy, Debbie said.
And it’s not lost on her that she’s back where she started.
“It’s like God takes you full circle back to what you were supposed to be doing,” Debbie said.
This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content
