Be the Blessing Bakery in spotlight,
Caterer Cathy Smith starts bakery, providing jobs to residents at Randy Sams shelter.
Heavenly scents drift out of the kitchen door as the bread pudding bakes.
Flour, dough and sugar are mixed to perfection and poured on a cookie tray.
The bakers themselves work quietly and efficiently and their confidence rises with the knowledge of a job well done.
Cathy Smith, a local professional caterer, started Be the Blessing Bakery at Randy Sams Outreach Center in 2015 and has been blessed many times in return.
“The name ‘Be the Blessing’ means don’t wait for the blessing in your life. Be the blessing,” Smith said. “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”
The bakery began when Smith began teaching monthly cooking classes at Randy Sams. The classes were for any resident who wanted to learn commercial cooking skills as well as economical, nutritious food that they could make once they moved into their own home.
The monthly class began in early 2015 and has had such success that participants were being asked to provide food for community events. Be the Blessing was born and the staff now bakes for special occasions, special events and are vendors in the Farmer’s Market in Texarkana, Texas. Smith is the bakery program director.
In September, the bakery moved into the kitchen of the Collins House on Olive Street. The historic home also houses Hands On Texarkana and Leadership Texarkana offices.
“It’s a fully licensed commercial kitchen. We bought a confectioner oven for the kitchen. There is no stove top so we have adapted some of our sauces” Smith said.
Smith has always cooked and enjoyed baking. When a friend started Jackie Oh’s Restaurant in downtown Texarkana, Smith made desserts there from 2009 to 2011.
After Jackie Oh’s closed, Smith decided to spend more time at her family’s farm in Umpire, Ark. She and her husband raised cattle during that time, but she would still receive calls from people requesting her baked goods for special events.
Baking seemed to be her destiny. She was also growing tired of raising cattle, especially when the cows would break out and run down the highway in the middle of the night.
“Cooking is easier than cows,” she said.
A friend offered use of a kitchen in Texarkana so Smith could cater out of it. But that plan fell through because of an emergency in her friend’s family.
Unsure what her future held, Smith was preparing for knee surgery and felt things were in flux.
Fate intervened one day when she dropped off some donations at
Randy Sams and spoke to Jennifer Laurent, director of the shelter, about her stalled plans.
“I told Jennifer I was thinking about opening a bakery but didn’t have a kitchen. Jennifer said, ‘Yes, you do.’”
Laurent offered Smith use of the large kitchen at Randy Sams, and Smith agreed if she could teach cooking classes to residents in return.
The first creation was her aunt’s biscuit recipe. After that, came meat loaf and chicken spaghetti. And then the baking took off with a life of its own.
“Williams Memorial (United Methodist Church) asked for a couple hundred cupcakes for an event they were having. The next day, the phone started ringing. Everyone wanted those cupcakes. We were making 400 to 500 cupcakes a day,” Smith said.
At that time, Smith had hoped Randy Sams could have its own bakery three or four years down the road. But Smith and her employees from Randy Sams were already up to their elbows in bread pudding, cheese cake, cupcakes, cookies and even wedding cakes.
The bakery was in the black in two months, Smith said. She started with about five employees now and now has three. All employees are residents of Randy Sams Outreach Center.
Smith said her bakery manager, Roger Kennedy, “didn’t know he was a manager. He didn’t know he was a baker.”
Smith and Kennedy recently returned from a baking convention in Las Vegas, where they took classes and made contacts.
Watching the employees gain self-confidence is one of Smith’s favorite things about the bakery.
“You see them grow in their self-confidence. You see them have faith in themselves,” she said.”They come in here and I more or less mother them. Nobody is going to get fired because a cake burned. They have something to go on a resume, and I write them a letter of recommendation, teach them a skill and send them out in the world.”
Smith has never been confident in her own cake-decorating skills, but she calls employee Drew Threadgill her “icing guru.”
“I handed him the piping bag, and it was like he had always been using it,” she said.
Threadgill also makes really good bread pudding. “He has got it down to a science,” Smith said.
Be the Blessing has won an Outstanding Community Service Award from the Texas Homeless Network and a best nonprofit award from the Better Business Bureau.
And every time the bakers serve up tasty treats, they are fighting stereotypes of what people in homeless shelters can do.
“There are misconceptions, but our products speak for themselves,” Smith said.
The staff always look professional when baking and delivering their products.
“I tell employees to be spic and span and shine like a copper penny. They wear chef’s coats and head coverings,” Smith said.
Her ultimate dream for the bakery is it having its own shop in downtown Texarkana.
In her downtime, Smith enjoys visiting her farm where she owns several cats and dogs, a goat and her Appaloosa mare named Dream.
She and her husband plan to build a cabin and spend time there relaxing.
“I want to sit on the back porch and hear the creek,” she said.
Smith does not regret any of the roads she has taken in life, even when there were unexpected twist and turns.
“It all led me here,” she said.