Hurricane Isabel began the renovation of the 1909 house then the Paynes took it from there. The result included a professional kitchen where Marie and Kelly mix, knead, and bake yummy treats for you. Just like the kitchen, there's a story to go with each of the Yummaries recipes. Some of these stories follow . . .

Smithfield's Chocolate Lovers Evening February 13, 2009

Yummaries claimed 2nd prize for our Chocolate Raspberry Roll and 3rd prize for our Skip-A-Dee-Doo-Dahs from the judge, Mary Griffith of Williamsburg!!! Thanks so much to everyone for enjoying our entries, including our Chocolate Bread Pudding, and being so generous with your donations to the Alzheimer's Association. Thanks also to the Smithfield Ice Cream Parlor for hosting Yummaries.

Marie checked out the Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park, NY, in July. Here she is in her uniform:

During Farmers' Market Week in August, 2008, Yummaries hosted a pie eating contest at the market. Kids ate quartered Chocolate Chess Pies and adults raced at eating quartered Apple Pies. Christian Littlefield (in the neon shirt) won the youth contest. Ryan Brown, a teacher at Westside Elementary School, won the adult contest. The contest was featured on the front page of the Smithfield Times with a picture entitled "Pigging Out on Pie".

Yummaries is a multi-award winning bakery and confectionery. At Smithfield's 2008 Chocolate Lover's Evening, Yummaries received the People's Choice Award and Second Place for their German Chocolate Tarts and Third Place for Orange Cream Bark.

German Chocolate Tarts won the People's Choice Award at Smithfield's 2008 Chocolate Lover's Evening.

At Smithfield's 2007 Chocolate Lover's Evening, Yummaries received First Place for their English Walnut Toffee and Second Place for their Chocolate Pound Cake with Chocolate Meringue Buttercream frosting.

Kelly, Marie, and the judges: two chefs from Kingsmill Resort, one of whom is the Executive Pastry Chef.

The top choice of the judges -- Yummaries English Walnut Toffee. 

Kingsmill Resort judges sampling Yummaries Chocolate Pound Cake with Chocolate Meringue Buttercream at Smithfield's Chocolate Lover's Evening.

In 2007, Yummaries was also selected for the Virginia's Finest designation.

Kelly was fortunate to have grown up on a farm in the Shenandoah Valley with talented family bakers in every direction. While many of the recipes and techniques have come from female relatives, Kelly's paternal grandfather, Victor Baker, regularly made wonderfully crusty bread and the Fruit Cake that Yummaries offers for sale.

Gardening is a part of life Kelly brought with her from the Shenandoah Valley. From the Yummaries kitchen windows you can see the butternut squash growing on the fences, zucchini soaking up the sun, and multiple trellises packed with blackberries. There are no food miles here, just a few feet from the garden to the oven!

As a pre-teen, Kelly spent many a weekend with her maternal great-grandmother, Dorothy Mitchell. One recipe they made frequently was a Wacky Cake. Kelly has the original recipe they followed, written on the back of an envelope (pictured). She often saw it over the years as she shuffled through her recipe box, but the time to make it finally occurred when Marie, her daughter, was several years old. Together they measured and mixed and eagerly awaited it coming out of the oven. Boy did it taste wacky! Kelly decided it made a better memory than an edible dessert to continue to make, but is thankful to have had the experiences of cooking and baking with her great-grandmother to set her on the path of baking.

One of Yummaries' best selling fruit breads is the Banana Nut Bread. The Paynes love everything about this bread - the dark, rich color, the strong banana flavor and aroma, the never ending moistness, and the palate pleasing texture. Over the years, Kelly misplaced the recipe several times. After each of the first misplacements, Kelly tried various banana bread recipes, always with disappointing results. Kelly's mother, Ann Jarrels, has the original recipe and can always locate her only copy of it. They've gotten a laugh several times over Kelly calling to ask for it . . . again . . . and again. Kelly now keeps all the copies in her recipe box and smiles as she comes across each one.

Soft cookies are an artform. Yummaries has them, but only after seeking advice from wonderful bakers, combining just the right ingredients, experimenting with pans, fiddling with oven temperatures, and tweaking cooling strategies. Before there was a Yummaries, the Paynes recruited family members to bake 1000s of huge cookies for Smithfield's Olden Days festival to benefit Marie's youth group. The first year they participated in the festival, they were selling out of the M&M Chocolate Chip cookies as fast as they could get them out of the oven and hand carried one block to the festival. This set the mark for freshness; fresh is a Yummaries standard. These mega-sized cookies have turned into Yummaries "market sized" cookies. The Oatmeal Raisin with Cinnamon Chips were added after several years of Olden Days. When cinnamon chips became hard to locate, Kelly and Marie began making their own chips. The cinnamon oil they add to the chips gives these cookies an extra zing you won't get anywhere else. The Molasses Crinkles recipe and all the hints on keeping them soft came from Marie's grandmother, Ann Jarrels.

Yummaries opened in 2005 bringing their baked goods, candies, and preserves to Smithfield's Olde Towne Curb Market every Saturday morning in the summer. The kitchen is abuzz on Friday afternoons, evenings, and nights as 100s of pounds of flour and sugar are transformed into homemade delights. Neighbors frequently stop by to "complain" that it smells too good for them to just walk on by. Most don't stay to see the ovens finally turned off not long before dawn on Saturday morning!

Perfect pie dough was the first technique Kelly decided to master as a teenager. Don't tell her mother, but she threw out the first non-perfect ones. Pineapple Pie has been Kelly's favorite since her first slice as a child at an auction. As yummy as the fillings are, once combined with the flaky pie crust, the only way to resist a slice of Yummaries pie is to give it away. Quite by accident (that's our story, and we're sticking to it), Julie Metz, Kelly's sister, invented the technique of placing a half slice of Cherry Pie on a plate beside of a half slice of German Chocolate Pie and then alternating bites. It doesn't get any better that this!

Although Kelly's father, Bill Baker, was a bee keeper for many years, Pear Honey is really pear preserves, made of pears and sugar. The name may come from them being just a tad runnier than most preserves, but this makes them spread so perfectly on fresh baked bread, pancakes, and biscuits. They have always been a family favorite. Bill Baker grows the pumpkins used in the Pumpkin Raisin Bread and Pumpkin Logs.

Ann Jarrels worked in the Virginia court system with a probation officer, David Smith, who loved to cook and trade recipes. When Kelly was a teenager, the recipe for the Five Flavor Pound Cake came home from work with her. It would raise an eyebrow when Kelly would tell people the recipe came from a probation officer, as they would always jump to the conclusion that it was from Kelly's probation officer. This cake is a top seller at Smithfield's Olde Towne Curb Market. A customer informed Yummaries that the recipe was developed by Watkins to sell five flavorings to customers. Once Marie grew out of the cartoon character birthday cakes, the Five Flavor Pound Cake has been her standard birthday cake.

The Paynes first saw homemade hard candy for sale at the annual Ferrum College Folklife Festival. Once tossed in powdered sugar, Marie thought it looked like the sea glass that so often washes up on our local beaches. Marie began making her Sea Glass Hard Candy when she was in elementary school. The flavorings and oils come from LorAnn Oils; Marie's jazzed up recipe is unique to Yummaries.

Prior to Kelly developing Mom's Fudge, she tasted some pretty good fudge in Nags Head, North Carolina, by way of Pennsylvania. Never to be outdone, she began with a recipe from her mother-in-law, Jean Payne, and used her chemistry background to design a fudge that is unbelievably creamy and smooth. The Paynes have been known to place five pound logs of their finest fudges on their nine foot square marble slab for the enjoyment of 100s of guests viewing the Smithfield Christmas Parade from their front porch.

Another fine baker, Jean Basnight (sister-in-law of Jean Payne), provided Yummaries with the recipes for the Chocolate Chess Pie and Sourdough Bread. For years, Jean has made this sweet sourdough for use during communion at Mount Olivet United Methodist Church in Manteo, North Carolina. A family joke began when John, Kelly's husband, took communion at Mount Olivet's Christmas Eve service. As he returned to his seat he whispered, "It was not the body of Christ; that was Aunt Jean's Sourdough Bread."

Although breadmaking is a family tradition, each family member had their own way of doing it. Victor Baker made his bread without salt, let it rise on the hearth covered with a thick cloth, and baked it in odd shaped pans that fit just so in the oven. Elenora Menefee, Kelly's maternal grandmother, mixed huge batches of dough in a Hobart floor mixer then formed the dough into 1000s of rolls on full sized sheet pans for the guests at Massanetta Springs Presbyterian Conference Center. Kelly still uses her "pinching" method to form Yummaries rolls. Ann Jarrels prefers to add various heart healthy grains to her dough. Marie and her cousins have enjoyed many a grilled cheese made with Grammy's homemade bread. Homemade preserves on homemade bread hot from the oven is hard to top!