Author: Julie Ray

Nomadic attorney and thespian in risk management bakes her mama’s love into every bite at Macaronagerie. Or so the story goes as Melissa Walker, owner of the Macaronagerie Memphis bakery, explains it.

By the time Walker was in high school, she had lived in four states and a baker’s half-dozen cities. Her family moved around a lot when she was young. The constants in her childhood home — wherever that might be — were that her dad went to work and her mama was an amazing cook.

“Mama showed me how to cook and bake for as long as I can remember. I have never taken her for granted. Growing up, I just presumed that everyone’s mama was an amazing cook.” Walker’s smile turns to a grimace as if remembering an instance to the contrary. “I discovered that was not the case,” her smile returns, “and I learned to appreciate her even more if that is possible.”

Pie in the Sky

One of the items Walker learned to make with her mother early on was custard for a coconut cream pie, her dad’s favorite. Avoiding making a sweet scrambled egg pie was a sacred task in her home. She learned to whisk a smooth custard unlike anyone else, save Mama. She remembers that Southern Living magazines and annual cookbooks filled the shelves in her childhood kitchens and were used frequently for new ideas, recipes, and just for the fun of reading. She recalls sticky notes, bookmarks, and handwritten notes sticking out of them, many of which she claims are still there today. Often, the end result of a recipe would not be as sleek and beautiful as the glossy photo in the cookbook, but the taste test always passed with flying colors.

It was in the kitchens of her childhood where she learned how much love and stress goes into preparing special treats for those you love, those you do not yet know, those you barely know as acquaintances, and even perfect strangers you will never meet.

After leaving home, Walker graduated from the University of Memphis as an English major where she found one class in particular suited her taste for learning like no other, a “Food in Literature” class.

“Babette’s Feast and Like Water for Chocolate, along with other literature related to food, gave me another insight into how personal food is,” Walker remembers.

But the energetic English major decided to table her love of food for the moment and attend law school at Ole Miss University. Walker not only graduated law school but also passed the Tennessee and Mississippi Board of Law bar exams at the same time. She worked as a practicing attorney for two years with a small firm in Hernando before realizing that being an attorney is about as miserable a job as you can possibly hope for. She decided to look for a non-law firm career where her education and skills could be utilized without having to maintain billable hours. This decision led her to the risk management field. She found it a great fit dealing with insurance claims, safety policy issues, litigation management, and “attorney wrangling.”

“All this really means,” says Walker, “is that I translate property management to attorneys and translate tort claim legal proceedings to property managers.”

Out of the Frying Pan

Finally, an old itch needed to be scratched — or rather, baked from scratch, as in cakes and cupcakes. Walker took a cake-decorating class to satisfy her appetite for the culinary arts. A longtime admiration of the artistry in making beautifully decorated cakes and a fascination with tricks of the trade led her to the class during a time when the cake and cupcake industry was growing exponentially.

Instead of being a way to manage stress, it became a source of stress.

“I realized that there was only so much I could accomplish with my skill set and resources,” said Walker. “It was entirely too stressful of a side hustle to happily maintain.”

In the presence of her overflowing effervescence, it is hard to imagine Walker as ever being stressed. But after working so hard to get a cake just right, she found herself fervently, incessantly praying that no one would run into her car during transport. Piddling along at five miles per hour so every bump in the road does not jostle the cake apart was too much stress. Now Walker says that every time she gets behind someone driving unreasonably slow, she does not get frustrated. Instead, she imagines that maybe they are transporting a cake and drives carefully behind them as cover so no one else will come along and rear-end them.

Once again, Walker tabled her aspirations for baking.

Crumbles

That was many years ago, and she has since returned to Memphis, her city of origin. Walker considers Memphis her home and has always lived here, even when she didn’t physically live here. In fact, she has hung her apron continuously in Memphis since 2001. She now thrives in risk management and has battered up for baking — again.

The inspiration for her path back to the kitchen was the one thing Mama always said about food, “So much love goes into loving the world with the food you make for them.”

This time, she started making macarons and cookies as a challenge when she found herself looking for a creative outlet as recently as two years ago. Her boyfriend, Kinon Keplinger, was working 20-hour days as a restaurant manager helping to get a new store open. She found herself with a lot of free time to look up recipes and make desserts for him to eat when he got home. Then she filled more hours by watching more Food Network and reading more social media posts about finding one’s passion. It was then that she decided her passion was to learn how to make something difficult in the realm of baking.

As it turns out, macarons are pretty much at the top of the difficult-to-make cookie list. Recalling the aspects of cake making that proved to be enjoyable, she realized that macarons also lent themselves to be amenable to a more artistic and creative path than your average cookie. And without the colossal stress of a cake.

She has folded her mama’s words about food into her own expanded version, “Preparing food is such a deeply personal endeavor. Your feelings of love, your feelings of stress/anxiety, your sadness, your resentment, your anger, your excitement, your passion, all manifests itself somehow in your cooking, whether you realize it or not. Your cooking is you.”

Perhaps her expanded beliefs are from her favorite college class, Food in Literature. From where hardly matters as Walker’s fervor is now insuppressible.

She continues, “The food you prepare is an expression of love and made with the intention of filling the people you care about with the sustenance you created. You are giving them something that will become a part of their bodies; something that will uplift their souls and bring them happiness and joy, something that will become them. That is a great personal undertaking and responsibility that should be handled with the utmost care.”

Selling Like Hotcakes

Walker tested and honed her home recipes for macarons and cookies. But it was through weekend work as a hostess at Restaurant Iris that her fringe familiarity with a commercial kitchen put her on the path to retail sales. She gives that credit to Chef Kelly English, owner of Restaurant Iris, and his trout amandine recipe. English shelved the popular entrée prior to the 2018 renovations to his upscale restaurant. His decision to place it back on the menu once Iris reopened was the inspiration for the magic ingredient Walker added to her cookies.

Intoxicated by the aroma of the brown butter being made for the dish, she experimented with the brown butter technique on her own. Then added it to her cookies. She was blown away at the first taste and kept making more. She brought them to the restaurant on weekends when she worked for everyone to try. Everyone loved them. The cookie-baking side-gig blossomed from there. English was so impressed, he asked if Walker would like to sell the cookies at Fino’s.

Currently, Fino’s is the only retail outlet where Walker sells her treats under the name Macaronagerie Memphis. In addition to chocolate chip cookies, Walker keeps the corner deli stocked with edible cookie dough and seasonal macarons of various sorts throughout the year. Almost every item has the intoxicating brown butter component. Though she keeps Fino’s stocked as best she can, Walker says that custom orders are coming in regularly. In fact, the bulk of her business now comes from custom orders and events, which can get in the way of keeping Fino’s stocked with her confections.

Confectionary Curtain Call

In addition to holding a law degree, working in risk management, baking, hostessing on weekends, and always looking fabulous like a modern June Cleaver, Walker is active in theater. She even has a few commercials under her apron belt. Because of this tie to acting and theater, she did pre-pandemic custom orders for opening night festivities of theater performances. Fully edible ink pots and quill pens were custom baked for the February 2020 opening performance of Quills at TheatreWorks and the subsequent opening performance of The Book of Will performed at Playhouse on the Square. Walker even created custom chocolate raspberry macarons for Quark Theatre’s opening of What Happens to the Hope at the End of the Evening. The lockdown last year put a crimp in that plan as well as Little Shop of Horrors opening at Playhouse on the Square last May. Walker had planned to create some edible Little Audries. For those not familiar, the irony is that Little Audrey is the people-eating plant in this musical. Tables turned.

Piece of Cake

Back on track, trolley tracks to be specific, Walker is making custom confections for the upcoming opening of Hello Dolly! at Theatre Memphis. The production opens on August 27th and will run through September 19th. It will be the first performance for Theatre Memphis with a live audience since the Covid lockdown in March 2020.

Walker and Keplinger — who, along with being her boyfriend, is a fellow thespian — landed roles in an upcoming production of Clue at Bartlett Performing Arts Center. The performance is based on the popular board game of the same name and will run November 19th-21st. Both thespians will play suspects, Mrs. White and Professor Plum, respectively. Though it seems custom confections may be in order, Walker is just not sure she will be able to bake and perform, adding, “We shall see.”

According to Walker, this fairly steady stream of corporate events, weddings, baby showers, and custom orders all run smoothly largely in part due to “tremendously supportive friends who make the execution of this venture possible at all and my boyfriend who is also talented in the kitchen, knowledgeable about the restaurant/food industry, and so supportive of me being successful.”

She also credits Todd English, who manages Fino’s, and Chef Kelly English with providing the foundation for growth that she needed to expand. Their belief in her treats and their trusted, candid feedback is invaluable to her, and she is grateful for their support and encouragement. Kelly English even cleared a path for Walker to make macarons with Priscilla Presley for an Elegant Southern Style event at the Graceland complex.

Though it has been said to never trust a skinny chef, in this case, it is perfectly acceptable to do just that. Walker comes by her fine fettle through hard work. Her secret? She’s been going to the same boot camp fitness program for over 15 years. Staying busy with a dizzying amount of interests doesn’t hurt either. She got the over-achieving gene from her mama who, in addition to being a great cook, mother, and homemaker, also worked as a nurse.

Now it all makes sense, right? Nomadic attorney and thespian in risk management bakes her mama’s love into every bite at Macaronagerie.

For custom orders, Walker can be reached through Facebook (Macaronagerie Memphis), on Instagram (macaronagerie_memphis), and by email, macaronageriememphis@gmail.com.