At my last appointment, my dentist, Dr. Jodi Rump, informed me that
I had no cavities. Then she directed my attention to her computer
screen, where she had a slideshow of pictures. Not pictures of my teeth
but pictures of cookies. Cookies decorated to look like saddle
oxfords.
“You have to go to the Busy Bakery in Bartlett,” she insisted.
“Their cookies are so good they make my teeth ache.”
Was she merely giving me a tip or trying to give me cavities?
Jodi Rump discovered the Busy Bakery’s owner, Rochelle McMahan,
through her sister-in-law, Katie Rump. Katie is Main Street Dental’s
financial coordinator and a mother of three. “We just called her the
Cake Lady,” Katie says.
Before opening the Busy Bakery last November, McMahan and her
daughter, Christina Hogan, used to do cake and cookie drop-offs at the
Exxon service station on Summer at Graham. “There would be 10 or more
cars waiting — all full of moms,” Katie says with a laugh. “When
McMahan pulled up in her Explorer, everyone jumped out of their cars
clutching their checkbooks.”
McMahan says at the height of their business, she and Hogan were
making two deliveries a day, sometimes in two cars. “After five years,
we were getting extremely busy and decided we better do something,” she
says. “We had a lot of people encouraging us to open a bakery.”
McMahan, a longtime baker who worked at Kay Bakery for more than 11
years, is renowned for more than cakes at her Bartlett storefront.
“We’re an old-fashioned bakery, and we make things that you can’t
find anywhere else, like cream horns, éclairs, turnovers, and
cinnamon rolls,” McMahan says. Her husband, Larry, also makes a variety
of breads to go with the sweets, and McMahan’s nephew and grandchildren
work behind the counter. “We’re a real family business,” she says.
Justin Fox Burks
Rochelle McMahan’s cookies: a labor of love
With so much to choose from, it’s hard to pinpoint the big sellers
at the Busy Bakery.
“Some weeks, it’s cakes. Some weeks, it’s cinnamon rolls,” McMahan
says. For now, the Busy Bakery is trying to keep up with the orders and
hoping that they continue to grow.
Valerie Hamilton, a business developer for a local law firm, says
parents were fighting over who got to take the sticker with the Busy
Bakery contact information off the cake box at her daughter’s 5th
birthday party.
“Zora’s dad heard about [the bakery] and ordered a Tinkerbell cake.
Holy moly, that cake was good!” she says. “The Tinkerbell cake actually
looked like Tinkerbell.”
Katie Rump threw her daughter a movie party on her 6th birthday. The
Busy Bakery created a 3-D cake shaped like a box of popcorn to fit the
theme. Since the featured movie was Hotel for Dogs, McMahan also
made cookies shaped like dogs and used real popcorn to decorate the
platter. But, according to Katie, the most amazing thing was when the
cake was accidentally dropped on the way out of the bakery. McMahan
offered to fix it for free, claiming it was “no big deal.”
So what are McMahan’s favorite cake creations? Hamburgers and
pizzas.
“Kids love pizza, so parents like to get cakes that look like
pizza,” she explains.
In addition to baking, the Busy Bakery hosts birthday parties where
children can make and decorate their own cakes, cupcakes, or
cookies.
“We have a lot of fun at our parties,” McMahan says. “On weekends,
we joke that we should have named ourselves the Busy Busy Bakery!”
