Auntie Em’s Baked Goods owner Emily Burney fulfilled a lifelong dream last week.
Burney opened her own brick-and-mortar shop at 1351 Kearns Blvd., Unit 150, after selling her sumptuous creations at the Park City Farmer’s Market, the Kimball Art Center and the Market at Park City.
“I’m ecstatic to create our own space and continue to share our baked goods with the community,” she said.
While the space is designed for customers to walkin, order and pickup, like a take-out pizza joint, Burney has packed the kitchen area with four ovens, a walk-in fridge, a walk-in freezer and an industrial mixer.
“That was fun,” she said with a laugh. “We shipped some ovens from Florida. We shipped some in from Ohio, and our fridge and freezer came from California.”
Burney, who lives in the Prospector area where the shop is located, came across the location, which is the former home of Summit Spa and Float, for quite some time.
“I wanted to be centrally located in Park City, but I also wanted a relatively small space, because square footage is so expensive here,” she said. “I limited myself to 1,000 square feet, and the shop is only 900 square feet.”
Burney also wanted ample parking.
“Something we hear over and over again is that there is no parking in Park City,” she said.
When the spa closed down and didn’t come back, Burney contacted a local realtor, who was able to get her in.
“The community has followed us to very random places, and it was time to create a kitchen and bakery with a direct-to-customer experience that was all ours,” she said.
Contractors began construction in October, and Burney and her husband, Pete Earle, did their own work on the space on the weekends and evenings.
“It’s pretty remarkable how we were able to take a tired dark spa and turn it into a bright, clean bakery in four and a half months,” she said.
Burney established Auntie Em’s Baked Goods in 2014, after taking a roundabout way to Park City from Illinois.
“Growing up in Chicagoland, I knew I wanted to make it out West,” she said. “I poked around Colorado, but randomly, during the recession (in the late 2000s), I found a job in St. George doing wilderness therapy.”
During one of the sessions, Burney met a member of the ski patrol of Canyons Resort a few years before it was purchased by Vail.
“I’d always had two very different dreams in my life — to work on ski patrol out West and to open a bakery in a mountain town,” she said. “So things worked out super well.”
Since working ski patrol left Burney’s summers relatively free, she had time to work on opening a bakery.
“I started at the Park City Farmer’s Market in 2014,” she said. “At that time I was also working bike patrol at the resort during the summer, so I would go to the farmer’s market one day a week.”
From then on, Burney began growing Auntie Em’s “slowly, steadily and organically,” including setting up at Copper Moose Farm Stand at 1285 Old Ranch Rd.
“We began doing more, and then I picked up some wholesale accounts,” she said. “Then I had to switch the pendulum, and give up on ski patrol and dedicate full time to baking.”
The recipes for Auntie Em’s pastries, which include an array of cookies and pies, are inspired by different sources, Burney said.
“Family recipes have definitely been inspirations for a lot of what we do, and we look at how we could improve it,” she said. “So we would do some minor tweaks to bring them up to modern-day palate and sensibilities.”
In addition, when Burney stumbles upon a new recipe, she’ll find ways to make them part of Auntie Em’s offerings.
“No one is going to say the biggest slice of the food pyramid is baked goods,” she said with a laugh. “So, we thought if you’re going to eat baked goods, we want to make sure they are really, really good.”
Auntie Em’s tastiness comes from sourcing local ingredients whenever possible, according to Burney.
“I think it’s really important to support the community,” she said. “To me that looks like supporting fellow small business owners — the apple farmer or producer grower — and paying employees a liveable wage.”
In keeping with sustaining the local providers, Auntie Em’s has also cultivated relationships with local wholesale partners, such as Atticus Coffee and Teahouse, Silver King Coffee, Daily Rise Coffee, Freshies Lobster Co., Harvest Park City restaurant, Park City Film, Park City Meadows Country Club, the Residences at Deer Valley, Silver Star Cafe and Alpine Distilling’s Alpine Social Aid and Pleasure Club.
The rewards of owning a bakery are two-fold, according to Burney.
“First, there’s the physical fruit of your labor,” she said. “I take flour, butter and milk, and with time and the right skills and processes, turn them into a pie. And then, as a second reward, we share the pie with the community and that spreads joy.”
Currently, Auntie Em’s Baked Goods is open from 10 a.m.- 2 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays.
“We are hoping to bring more team members on and expand our hours earlier in the morning and later in the afternoon to catch the work crowd and ski crowd,” she said. “And we still plan to participate in the Park City Farmer’s Market and the Copper Moose Farm Stand. We will still sell our packaged goods at the Market, and we still plan to fulfill our orders with our wholesale partners.”
Meanwhile, Burney wanted to express her thanks to the Park City community.
“I’m so grateful to the community for encouraging me and helping me grow this business to the point where we can fulfill the lifelong dream of having our own bakery in a western mountain town,” she said.