A Home Bakery in the Cumberland Hills of Tennessee

Interested in starting a home bakery on your rural land? Michelle Leonard of Michelle's Baked Goods in Muddy Pond, Tennessee shares how she started her successful cottage bakery, plus tips for starting your own.Nestled atop the rolling hills of Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau, Muddy Pond is a tranquil off-the-beaten-path community of about 500 residents. Within two hours east of Nashville, the region has several Mennonite and other businesses to attract visitors. Autumn is also a perfect time to explore and maybe catch the sorghum harvest and its syrup-making process.

Amid this quiet scenic beauty, Michelle Leonard has built a successful cottage bakery, Michelle’s Baked Goods, from her home and is part of a growing trend of rural women able to do so thanks to varied cottage food laws.

Michelle was raised Mennonite and is among the fourth generation of her family to live in Muddy Pond. The Guenthers have owned and operated the Muddy Pond Sorghum Mill since 1965.

It was there that Michelle began to sell her treats when she was twelve, and it’s been a tradition to have baked goods available at the mill during the sorghum harvest season.

Her grandparents and great-grandparents, along with other Old Order Mennonites in their group, moved to Muddy Pond in 1964 from Snyder County, Pennsylvania, and much of her family is originally from Saskatchewan, Canada. Within a year, they began growing sorghum and gleaning syrup as a source of income.

Now, according to Michelle, their mill is among only two operations in the state that make sorghum in small batches. As she says, “It is a dying art.” [You can watch videos of their family making sorghum on the Appalachian Channel here and in an older video here.]

In 1995, Michelle’s grandmother, Emma Guenther, opened the Muddy Pond Variety Store. This old-time store is where she sells her baked goods, and it sits next to their former family home, where Michelle and her family still gather for larger canning and baking projects.

“My parents are loving and wonderful people who gave us a great life, and my mom never fussed if I wanted to make a mess in the kitchen,” Michelle said. “Baking is truly a passion of mine.”

Between jobs in 2020, Michelle decided it would be fun to have her baked goods available year-round. A natural marketer, she did a molasses cookie giveaway to get her first hundred Facebook followers. [As of this writing, she has 4,500 followers.]

“My husband’s career made it so that it wasn’t strictly necessary for me to work, but I was raised to lend a hand and help out — and I don’t like to sit around,” she smiled.

Michelle allows order pick-ups from her home and provides a few local vendors with weekly deliveries of fried pies and cookies. She also bakes a variety of whole pies, sourdough bread, frosted cinnamon rolls and other confections, such as Appalachian Stack Cake (like a stacked pancake with apple butter spread in between its layers).

“I absolutely love being able to feed people and give them memories of happier times with their parents and grandparents with nostalgic baked goods. You cannot just go out and buy these products in your local big box stores,” Michelle said.

“Even in our area of Appalachia, a lot of bakeries do not carry fried pies or stack cake, so it is a niche market to me, and it makes me so happy to see people come in and taste things and say, ' This reminds me of my grandma (which, happily, happens often).”

Mother of two, including an infant, Michelle arises early in the morning to put her bread in pans and to start the fryers for various fried hand pies filled with fruit (which she noted are her best sellers).

Indeed, a cottage bakery or other home-based business lets rural women work from home doing something they love while sharing that passion with others.

“It makes me feel great that I have a unique skill set and a customer base that allows me to help take care of my family,” Michelle enthused.

“I consider myself lucky and blessed both for the beautiful community in which I live and the sense of community that has pervaded for generations now in this little corner of Appalachia. I think about my sweet children and hope that I can pass down to them the same values that were instilled into me. Hard work, common sense, how to treat others and the joy of a sweet treat for dessert made with ingredients that matter.”

And you can taste the excellent quality, care and love that goes into every bite.

Tips for Starting Your Own Cottage Bakery Business

If you live in the country—or even some suburbs now—you are likely to know of a local bakery stand at someone’s home or farm. In addition to following your state’s cottage laws for home baking or canning, Michelle advises:

• Make sure to create and maintain a Facebook page for good interaction with your customers and to update your information regularly
• Be consistent with online marketing and take nice photos of your products
• Include all of the information that people need in the body of your post text [“The easier you can make it for people to purchase, the more sales that you will have.”]
• Prepaid is key to avoid heartache with pickups
• She adds: “Try to find the thing in your area that not very many other people are doing, but as with anything, if you don’t enjoy it or have a passion for it, that tends to become apparent with time.”

IF YOU GO [NOTE: Locations are in the Central Time Zone • Links are to related Facebook pages or websites]

• Michelle’s Baked Goods: To order and arrange pick-ups: Text or call at (951) 510-6083. You can also send a message from her Facebook page • In November and December, she adds apple stack cakes and fruit cake to her regular offerings, “ the old-fashioned delicious fruit cake to which the store-bought kind can’t hold a candle!”
• Muddy Pond Sorghum Mill: 4064 Muddy Pond Road, Monterey, TN • (931) 445-3509 • Open in September and October: Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday (9 AM-3 PM).
• Muddy Pond Variety Store: 4064 Muddy Pond Road, Monterey, TN • (931) 445-3357 • Open Year Round: Monday-Friday (9 AM-3 PM) and Saturday (9 AM-4 PM)

The Country Porch: 3130 Muddy Pond Road, Monterey, TN • (931) 445-7370 • Open Tear Round: Monday-Saturday (8AM-5PM)

If you can’t visit in person, you can purchase the Guenther Family Table cookbook, and sorghum, from the family website. The cookbook, organized by Michelle, was inspired by her mother, Doreen Guenther, who always wanted to have a family cookbook with heirloom and sorghum recipes.

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