Hampden home kitchen business harnesses resident’s love of baking

Nov. 22, 2022 | Sarah Heinonen
sheinonen@thereminder.com

Debra Brown holds a plate of cupcakes in her home kitchen, the headquarters of Spudley’s Sweets.
Reminder Publishing photo by Sarah Heinonen

HAMPDEN – In a small house on a quiet road in Hampden, Debra Brown has made a business out of baking, where she says, “The secret ingredient is always love.”

Brown works full-time as an English language arts teacher at West Springfield Middle School, but said Spudley’s Sweets “started pretty early on in the pandemic. I was doing a lot of baking with my girls.”

She added that she had so much baked goods that she began giving them to neighbors. When they reacted positively, she decided that she could make a small home business out of it. She said she is lucky because “I love teaching. I love baking. I love being a mom.”

The small farm on which Brown lives and works once belonged to her grandmother. “I learned how to bake in this house,” she told Reminder Publishing. She learned to bake at an early age from her mother and grandmother, who instilled in her lessons about baking and life. “The first time I messed up a batch of brownies, I think I was 6 years old, I cried.” Her mother told her it was okay, and they could just make new ones. That lesson stuck with her.

When Brown first began her business, she had no idea that she needed to be licensed by the town and toward the end of summer in 2021, Spudley’s Sweets was shut down. Much like with that batch of brownies, Brown tried again. She said getting a home kitchen license was relatively easy and the town was helpful. After classes on Safe Serve regulations and handling food allergens, and a home kitchen inspection, Spudley’s Sweets was fully licensed and running again.

Spudley’s Sweets offers cupcakes, pies, salted caramel and truffles. Lately, she said, she has been getting more into baking cakes. “I put things on my website that I like making,” Brown said. She usually makes a variety of three to six different items for the weekend and then advertises what is available on social media. “People like not knowing what is available,” she said. While Brown does not know how many customers she will get in a given weekend, she said she quadruples a standard recipe she would make for her family, and oftentimes sells out by the end of the weekend.

Brown will also make special orders for customers who request specific items. Holiday orders are often larger, but she has never had a special order too large to accommodate. “I could handle 200 cookies as long as I had a couple of weeks’ notice,” she mused. Rather than having an order form on the website, http://spudleysweets.com, Brown takes orders over the phone so she can discuss each order personally.

“There’s something about being able to share something I love with people,” Brown said about why she enjoys her business. “Knowing how much I care about it and the family aspect makes it so much more special.” She added, “I’m the place to go for something that tastes like your grandma made it but is pretty enough to take to a dinner party.”

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