Most mornings, my alarm goes off before the sun’s fully up; I have always been a lark, a morning person. For half the week these days, I’m wake up with the smell of cinnamon, butter, and something warm that says home. It’s not a candle… it’s my wife and I, already elbows-deep in dough and dishes, working before I go off to work on Thursdays and Fridays, or before our kids wake up on the weekends.
Life with a cottage baker means our house doesn’t just feel like home, it smells like it, sounds like it, and sometimes looks like a flour or corn starch bomb went off in the kitchen. We’ve traded quiet mornings and sleeping in on the weekends for the hum of the mixer and the oven timer’s persistent beeping. And honestly… I would not have it any other way.
My role? I’m the supply-run guy on my lunch break during the week (shout out to our local grocer for setting up a Tuesday “special order of fourteen bags of our gluten-free flour for an efficient pickup), grabbing parchment paper and powdered sugar like it’s gold. I’m the late-night dishwasher on weekdays and all-day dishwasher on weekends. The designated cooler cleaner, tech support when the label printer gives attitude, and general accountant keeping the books to be ready for tax season. When it’s time for a pop-up event, I’m right there doing the Tetris load in the car, setting signage, and trying to connect our Square to my wife’s phone.
There’s a rhythm to it all (which has taken lots of run-throughs to get it down and that we are still tweaking). We’re not just running a bakery, we’re building something together. She brings the recipe, I bring the systems. She creates the magic; I help get it into people’s hands.
Supporting a cottage baker means living somewhere between spreadsheets and sticky countertops. While it’s not always clean or quiet, it is ours. And there’s something incredibly meaningful about rising early, putting in the grind, and simply doing what needs to be done together. Watching our home become a place of that produces joy for others, one batch of cinnamon rolls at a time, is a gift I never expected but am so grateful for in this stage of life.
Ethan Avina 