Just past Market 22 off East Harbor Highway in Maple City, people can find Brittany Watson’s farmstand stocked with homemade, delicious mini cakes. Watson said she and her family originally began selling just eggs at the stand and expanded into offering sweets this summer. From chocolate peanut butter to almond cake with triple berry jam and Chantilly cream, Watson offers unique flavors every week for people to try.
“I change my flavors weekly, it’s kind of what I feel like making. Like this weekend I’ll probably bake a traditional carrot cake, but I’m going to do my raisins soaked in brandy,” Watson said. “So I do a lot of different tweaks on things. It’s fall time now, so one of my big sellers for fall is chocolate bourbon cake that is stuffed with pecan pie filling. Then it has a brown butter buttercream on top with some roasted pecans.”
Summertime is the busiest for Watson, who works as an asphalt project manager at Team Elmer’s. Baking and creating sweets is more of a side gig, but allows for Watson to experiment with recipes and flavors, a hobby she’s come to love over the years. Since honing in on her passion for baking in the last decade, she’s made wedding and birthday cakes for family and friends, as well as cupcakes, mini cakes, and Watson’s newest favorite, macaroons.
“I love little treats, it’s kind of my thing,” she said. “Cupcakes are a great medium, but macaroons are a new passion for me. I love them and my daughter is obsessed with macaroons, so she’s my little taste tester… I like doing different flavor combinations and I really like just giving people a little treat. Sometimes that can turn a whole day around to have something that puts a smile on your face.”
Watson grew up in Leelanau County and dual-enrolled at Northwest Michigan College (NMC) in high school. After finishing up her second year at NMC, Watson transferred to Northern Michigan University, attending the school for about a year before changing majors and transferring one last time to Michigan Tech University. She followed in her mother and father’s engineering footsteps, graduating with a degree in chemical engineering.
“I’m from a family of engineers, my dad is a civil engineer and my mom is electrical,” she said. “I loved chemistry, but I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do, so my mom told me to get an engineering degree and then figure it out and that’s what I did.”
When Watson graduated, she relocated to Elizabethtown, Kentucky to pursue an engineering job at Dow Corning, where she would eventually meet her husband, Rich. She switched jobs to work at Vogt Power as a thermal sales engineer in that time too, and not long after, Watson and Rich started a family of their own.
While living in Louisville, Watson made a visit to the Maker’s Mark Bourbon festival, which is also when she brought with her different treats made with bourbon to sell. One woman that Watson happened to meet through the festival really enjoyed her treats and asked if she’d make her daughter’s birthday cake. The woman, who was a higher up at Brown-Forman Cooperage, one of the world’s largest producers of whiskey barrels, fell in love with the cake, and recruited Watson to bake more sweets at future events.
“She got me hooked up with all of their (Brown-Forman) events, so anytime they had a release party or a new bourbon or something like that, they’d give me a bunch of the new stuff and say ‘here, go make treats for this party we’re having,’” she said.
For a few years, Watson stayed at home to focus on raising her kids, eventually making the decision to move back to the Leelanau area in 2019.
“I love small towns — small communities where you kind of know everybody and it’s like a little family out there,” she said. “I love Leelanau county because it’s smaller than Traverse City, which is a little too busy for me.”
These days, the kitchen is where Watson’s family tends to gather much of the time. Watson’s husband loves cooking himself, and it’s one of their goals to someday open up a restaurant of their own together where she does all the baking and he does the cooking.
People can stop by Watson’s farmstand at 455 E. Harbor Highway on Fridays, where treats will typically be for sale through the weekend. Watson will have sweets for sale into the fall, and hopes to continue offering cakes and other baked goods into the winter season, depending on the reception she gets in the months ahead.
