[title subtitle=”words: Marla Cantrell
Images: courtesy Mary Cervantes”][/title]
Somebody needs to thank Mary Cervantes’ mama for having a sweet tooth. Because of that, Mary grew up watching her make Russian tea cakes, and Mexican sweet empanadas and dozens of chocolate chip cookies. She loved everything about baking: the precise measurements, the science behind what made a recipe work, the joy of giving treats away to neighbors and friends. In high school, she bought her first cookbook and often coaxed her mom into buying the ingredients she needed to make more and more complicated desserts.
While studying economics at Stanford University, Mary was too busy to bake much. She did squeeze in time to make her first pecan pie, and she gave it to her boyfriend, who was smart enough to marry her a few years later.
After graduating, when she was living in San Francisco and working in finance, she whipped up batch after batch of cookies for her co-workers. It was a happy time, and Mary, who grew up mostly in California, saw her future playing out in the Golden State. But she moved to North Carolina when she got married and stayed a year while her husband finished his MBA degree at Duke. In 2012, he accepted a position at Walmart corporate offices in Bentonville, Arkansas.
By then, they had a two-month-old daughter. The following year, when Mary was pregnant with their second daughter, she started a baking business. It seemed like the perfect plan. She’d run it from her home, selling desserts online and at local events.
“I started off by letting the moms in my moms’ group know that I was making cake pops and mini-cupcakes and French macarons,” Mary says. “I would take desserts to the businesses in downtown Bentonville, and I’d tell them they could have some and pass the rest out to their customers, just to get my name out there.”
Initially, she mostly made cake pops for kids’ birthday parties. Some of them were intricate affairs, including one design that looked like a vintage airplane, complete with the propeller. Soon, though, her French macarons (meringue cookies with butter-cream filling) started catching on. Not only were people buying them, they were also interested in learning how to make them. So Mary started teaching classes in 2014.
The trick to making these delicate cookies is not over-mixing the batter. “The stirring part is so important it has its own name: the macaronage. If you under-do it, the cookie will come out with peaks. If you overdo it, they’ll crack. They’re one of my pricier cookies, but if you ever take one of my classes, you’ll understand why. It takes me about two to three hours to make a batch, if I’ve pre-measured everything ahead of time.”
Mary is describing her baking process while sitting in her living room at her home in Bentonville. Her youngest daughter, who’s a year old, dark-haired and dark-eyed and gorgeous, is sitting on her lap. The kids’ playroom is visible from this spot, and the toys are in neat rows, with a playhouse not far away, and a play kitchen standing by, with all the bells and whistles.
On the coffee table, beside a book on prayer and one on cooking, are two small French apple cakes, warm from the oven. The cakes are so good, you could imagine fights breaking out over them.
“My idea starting out was to create elegant, beautiful desserts that really focus on flavors and the ingredients, versus a decorated cake. To me, a raspberry tart with only raspberries covering the top is so pretty to me.”
Mary, whose husband calls her “The Insatiable Sweet Tooth,” is always on the hunt for new ideas. She laughs and then says, “It’s kind of embarrassing, but even on trips, I’m planning everything around the food. We went to Tulsa and I had all these places to try, but we did find a way to squeeze in the kids’ trip to the zoo.”
While living in San Francisco, she’d often buy chocolate pear bread from a bakery she loved. Just before she moved, she asked for the recipe, but they weren’t sharing. It didn’t stop her. “I’ve spent years perfecting that recipe,” Mary says, “trying to figure out how they did it. I experimented with different cooking times, even different pans, and lots of ingredients. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to do a side-by-side testing of my bread and theirs.”
In December of last year, Mary had a booth at The Little Craft Show in Fayetteville, a two-day shopping event filled with items made by artisans. She made everything from her chocolate pear bread to peppermint marshmallows to chocolate chip cookie shots (the cookie makes the shot glass, which holds the chocolate filling). She lined up rows and rows of her French macarons, in flavors like lavender and strawberry and salted caramel. Hers are crisp like an eggshell on the outside, chewy on the inside, and took her a full year of experimenting to perfect. Well before noon on the second day, she’d sold them all. “I didn’t sleep the night before,” Mary says, and then talks about how her husband stepped in, how he always steps in, to help. “He knows how much joy baking brings me,” Mary says.
“I’ve had people say, ‘I’ve not had a macaron this good since I was in Paris.’ What a compliment. And I had an older man who had owned a restaurant at one time. He’d seen my airplane cake pops, and he said, ‘I saw these cake pops and I knew the woman who made them knew her craft, loves what she does, and she’d be a very hard person to work for.'”
Mary shakes her head and smiles. Her littlest one is now playing with a pail filled with puppets: a king, a cow, a knight. She slips her tiny hand inside the cow and giggles. Mary dreams of the day her daughters bake with her. Already, she has a wooden contraption that looks a bit like a step stool, and allows a young child to safely stand at kitchen cabinet height. And already, they’re seeing the mysterious ways of baking. How easily one thing can turn into another.
The conversation up to this point has been predominately about food. Now, she talks about her family, how she met her husband at a rosary class, how they both dreamed of the same things, and how incredible it is to have their three daughters. “I want them to enjoy baking with me, but more than that I want to raise good girls, loving, intelligent and kind. I’ve always wanted this. I always envisioned a big family, kind of chaotic, but everyone loving to be together.”
One day, Mary says, she might buy a food truck. In her “millionaire dreams,” she imagines living in Paris, the city she loves, shopping at the markets every day and then coming home to cook. Her family would gather around a big wooden table and share stories of their day, and they would talk until the sun went down, until it was time to bring out dessert. Because in Mary’s dreams, there is always dessert.
To order desserts or sign up to take a French macaron baking class, visit maryslittlesweets.com. You can also follow Mary’s Little Sweets on Facebook and Instagram, to keep up with her latest menu offerings.
