Grocery News: Baking Mixes for People Who Bake
By Katy Killilea
Have you seen the shiny blue coffee bags of Bristol Harbor Homemade baking mixes? These mixes for cookies, scones, and breads are the ingenious creation of local area parent Cindy Elder. After she assembled baking mixes in Mason jars for a fundraiser at her daughter’s elementary school, people kept requesting more, more, and more. Now the mixes are sold in hundreds of stores nationwide. Yum!
Even if you don’t usually bake from mixes, these are irresistible, even for the mix snobs in your life. The ingredients contain all the baking basics: oats, sugar, flour, and the like. You add your own beer/rum/water/melted butter/canola oil as directed. The company will soon be entirely nut free, with the mixes packaged in an entirely nut-free facility in Maine. As it is now, any nuts are separated from the rest of the mix in a sealed foil packet.
My four-year-old son and I recently made Chocolate Chip Bakery Cookies. Dump, measure water, melt butter, pour, stir, bake. The house filled with the wonderful scent, and the cookies were delicious. My boy chose to leave out the walnuts, which I munched on all morning. Could we have made the cookies from scratch? Sure, but this was awfully convenient. We made the whole shebang before 9:30 a.m. so we could pack the cookies in a picnic and hit the road.
Available in nine varieties online at bristolharborhomemade.com and locally all over the place: Belmont’s in Wakefield, Clements’ Market in Portsmouth, Coastal Roasters in Tiverton, Eastside Marketplace and Whole Foods on the East Side, the Market at Cutler Mills in Warren, Wickford Gourmet, Teapots & Tassles in Barrington, and many other locations in Rhode Island, the United States, and Bermuda.
Read about the owner Cindy Elder of Bristol Harbor Homemade in the Kidoinfo interview series - Home Work.
Photography by Katy Killilea
Category: food + recipes, grocery news
Kidoinfo
To Cindy: Ever thought of doing gluten free mixes….. we would love to support a local mom-business in our quest for the perfect gluten free baked goods.
hi sarah-i’ll forward your comment to cindy, just in case she doesn’t see it here.
katy
Yum yum yum-I’m sold!
Bristol Harbor Homemade mixes would be a tremendous hit on the Cape. Think of all those hungry beachgoers who don’t want to spend all day in the kitchen, yet crave something yummy.
That little guy should have his own show.
Dark & Stormy Ginger cookies just ruined my life. “I love all of the cookies you make, but these ginger cookies are somehow just even so much better!” (So said the eater, not knowing they were from Cindy’s mix.) Grrrrrr. Great product, low baking self esteem.