And to this reporter, nothing furthers that cause more than the arresting taste of the tiny white chocolate chips concealed in their snickerdoodles.
To me, they’re just the ticket.
For Donnelly and Carlson, the joint venture behind the frosting-colored storefront in the village’s historic Junior Building represents a lifelong vocational dream.
During many of the 30 years spent as an administrative assistant at the F.F. Mueller Residential Center, Donnelly moonlighted in her own kitchen, making birthday and wedding cakes and other made-to-order items for steady and loyal clientele.
And, as it turned out, her daytime gig prepared her for the business side of her new pursuit.
Having earned an associate’s degree in her 20s, Carlson went back to Sinclair Community College’s Culinary Arts program as an adult and stuck with it for the 6½ years it took to complete the program and earn a second associate’s degree.
Along the way, she augmented the love of baking she’d learned from her aunts Millie and Esther with knowledge about what contributes to the textures of flours and batters and what makes for good chemistry in the kitchen.
“Baking is a science, so you have to be much more careful.”
She’s put her knowledge of that science to work adapting recipes she long used at home for the bakery’s commercial oven.
Although they’re no longer working out of their homes, both women still rely on home grown advisers — their families — as their best and worst critics.
Because “they don’t worry you’re going to be mad at them,” Donnelly said, they’re not afraid to say if a recipe bombs or is “The Bomb.”
For Donnelly, the bakery’s location has many practical plusses: Its walking distance from her home, the light that pours in through huge plate glass windows, and its location on Ohio 41 across from the post office where area folks stop daily to pick up their mail.
But for the woman who, as a child, took dance and baton lessons upstairs in the building and who is one of five generations of her family now living in North Hampton – joining Angels Hair Studio and the Hampton Grill in the old Junior Hall is more than icing on the cake.
Many of her customers, too, remember the place fondly, though perhaps don’t have the quantity of memories stored in the brain of Donnelly’s grandfather, 97-year-old Howard Shaffer.
The Springfield, Troy & Piqua Railway, whose memory is still honored in the village, had stopped its service before Shaffer’s arrival, and the village had already incorporated in so it could put bills on tax duplicates and continue having the electric service it had petitioned for.
But Shaffer does remember when the main thoroughfare was a gravel highway called Ohio 70, not Ohio 41.
He remembers when the Junior Hall, named for a fraternal organization, was home to Grover Hughes’ Barber Shop and Tom’s Restaurant, where in the 1950s, Tom Baum offered a Sunday chicken dinner with dessert for $1.
He recalls when the post office also was housed in the Junior Hall, as was Hallock’s Hardware and Kitchen Furnishings.
The same Hallock sent trucks south each year to get lumber for his lumber yards in North Hampton and Dialton – trucks that could gas at a Sinclair, Sohio and two other gas stations.
The Junior Hall’s second floor hosted Farmers Institutes, at which presenters shared the latest advances in farming, and minstrel shows. The once bustling village also was home to Martin’s Market, Helen’s Beauty Parlor, Stout Shoe Shop and Fletcher’s Dry Cleaning.
While it’s true that Ford, Chevrolet and John Deere tended to have just one new vehicle on display in each of their North Hampton showrooms, the village had those dealerships nonetheless – and another one selling the yellow tractors manufactured by Minneapolis-Moline.
There was an elevator and feed mill, a brick house was home to the North Hampton Inn, and at one time there was a large grocery with a creamery across the street from the Junior Building.
The building that replaced the grocery still stands where the original burned in August of 1930, something Shaffer discovered the Sunday after the fire when his family came in town to go to church.
“News didn’t travel fast in those days,” he said.
But every Halloween, Goldie Snider’s cow, traveled under escort from a barn where the Family Dollar now sits, front of one of the Junior Hall’s store, just like shocks of corn were found in a pile thick enough to block traffic on Fox Hollow Road.
Shaffer’s daughter and Donnelly’s mother, Anna Richardson, remembered another nugget of town history as she listened to him talk: That in 1962, when her father moved from the country to West Clark Street, a guy named Woody ran an early convenience store out of a shack and lived out back in a travel trailer.
It was an addition to a town Shaffer said once took care of the practical needs of people in the vicinity.
“We were always lucky here that Hampton had roofers, had plumbers,” Shaffer recalled. “If you had problem you always had somebody close you could call.”
The town’s commerce has, of course, thinned out from its more active days, maybe because the old gravel highways have given way to paved ones and made it easier for people to go elsewhere for what they needed. Richardson wonders whether more ready transportation and the larger scale of business might also be involved in Springfield’s loss of retail business to regional centers closer to Dayton.
But Donnelly and Carlson have found other things around North Hampton haven’t changed. Their customers’ tastes tend to be traditional. Peanut butter, oatmeal-raisin and chocolate chip cookies are favorites, as are blueberry muffins. Chocolate and vanilla cupcakes are good sellers, and most people prefer “good old buttercream” frostings over the more sculptural fondants.
They hope that as their bakery grows, Carlson can introduce some more modern tastes to their display cases and hours might expand as well. But for the time being, “It’s Your Party” will be open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday.
Even if you don’t remember the hours, when you pass through North Hampton, it’s something to keep on your radar.
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