Bakery owner stays creative through pandemic
WAKE VILLAGE, Texas — Before becoming a bakery owner, Wake Village resident Beverly Daniels never thought she would one day have to re-arrange the front of her business to look like a bank teller’s window.
However, with the pandemic creating a need to limit customer access to her “Munchables Home Baked Goodness” bakery, Daniels found a way to adjust to this viral adversity.
With her husband’s help, Daniels installed at the front her store what appears to look very much like a bank teller’s counter top, with a small lower arch opening cut into the customer window.
“Sometimes you just have to be open to new things,” Daniels, said. “It was also as close to curb service as I could get.”
Daniel’s new arrangement also somewhat resembles a ticket counter at an old time, late 1940s movie theater — when theater ticket counters use to be at the very front of the movie house.
“I started this new arrangement about six weeks ago, but I’m looking forward to going back to the way things were before COVID -19 came along,” she said.
Daniels also did some rearranging of cakes, cookies, pies and cupcakes.
Just by looking at the array of sweets in her store — located in the 4400 block of West Seventh Street — customers might think Daniels spent her whole life baking s sweets. In actuality, she started only nine years ago. The first two were at a bake shop close to Wake Village’s circle before she moved out to West Seventh.
Before opening her own business, Daniels actually did work in banking in Texarkana, before going on to to work for 21 years at the Rural Electric Cooperative of Arkansas on East Ninth
Street. She also worked for Texarkana College, for about six months, in the payroll department.
“Just decided to leave the office environment,” said Daniels, who earned a bachelors degree in business administration from East Texas State UniversityTexarkana (now Texas A&M University-Texarkana) in 1980. “I actually did become a banking officer for 10 years, before I quit to take care of my daughter until she grew up.”
At Texarkana National Bank she worked as a bookkeeper, in the clerical department, in data processing, processing commercial loans and computer operation trouble-shooting. At
REA, Daniels worked in payroll and human resources.
Following her brief stint with TC, Daniels decided it was no longer the the right time for being in an office environment.
“For me, it came about through divine inspiration,” she said. “I had a collection of cook books that I enjoyed working from so I decided to open a store on my own. I decided to do this because it gave me pleasure and joy. It was just an opportunity to venture into unknown territory and to be creative. I just wanted to plant a tree and watch it develop. For me this business started nine year ago as a seed and now it’s a tree.”