This Takes the Cake: Whisk Me Away has a home

On my first visit to Whisk Me Away, the new bakehouse inside Pawtucket’s Lorraine Mills, I purchased three cake jars — funfetti birthday cake, chocolate caramel and spice salted caramel — namely because I couldn’t decide which flavor I wanted. Constructed from leftover pieces of cake (owner Morgan Gray uses a sheet pan and a round cutter to form her cakes rather than a circular mold so she has corner scraps), these jars are a ready-to-eat dessert that requires nothing more than a spoon. 

“Just one bite,” I thought, cracking open the lid, and the next thing I knew three-quarters of the jar was gone and I had caramel hanging from my chin. This cake was so — pardon the word — moist, and decadent and rich; it was honest-to-God the best chocolate cake I’ve ever eaten.

Gray’s talent is as big and exuberant as her personality, the latter of which involves copious amounts of laughing, singing and dancing in the kitchen. “When I’m baking, if I don’t have headphones plugged in, I have the music turned all the way up and I’m screaming and dancing. I mean — I’m not working at a desk. I have a kitchen to dance around in, so why not?” 

Three weeks after her grand opening, I sat down with Gray to learn about the genesis of Whisk, which started as an assignment for her entrepreneurial class at Johnson and Wales. One of the most endearing threads throughout her story is the love and support of her family. 

“They are the best people in the world,” Gray says. “My dad built this kitchen!” She points to the back half of her studio, separated from the retail space by a partition with a full-sized window. “He has an engineer’s mind; he drew up plans, looked into equipment. He guided me through this process.”

But this support has existed from the beginning, when Gray announced in high school that she wanted to study pastry after she’d talked so much about becoming a therapist. (Yes, we have since determined the synonymous relationship between eating baked goods and weeping on a couch.) Rather than bombard her with questions, her parents took her to visit JWU, and she accepted on early decision. 

For her required internship, Gray wanted to work at a restaurant, rather than a bakery, under the guidance of a pastry chef. Her mom drove her to Hotel Viking in Newport where she was offered a position as executive pastry chef. She was 19 years old — making her both the youngest member of the kitchen as well as the only woman — and when she went back to the car to tell her mom, her mom said, “You have to do it.” 

A few years later, when Gray resigned from a promising job in Boston — one that offered a great opportunity but kept her from seeing family and friends and sleeping more than three hours a night — her family welcomed her home. “I spent a month crying on my parents’ couch,” she says. “I was looking for another job, but nothing felt right.” So her family and friends encouraged her to start a business, since that’s what she ultimately wanted to do. 

“It was the first thing that made me excited,” she admits, and in the fall of 2017 she joined Pilot Works, the first Providence-based culinary incubator (it went out of business a year later, and is now theProvidence Kitchen Collaborative). “Somehow I figured out the licensing and all of the things I needed to do a week before the Thanksgiving bake-off,” she says. She launched Whisk Me Away on Thanksgiving 2017 and received an incredible response. “I had to call my dad partway through and ask, ‘Can you come help me?’ And he did. And he did the same thing the next holiday.” 

It’s clear that Gray looks up to her dad, whom she’s nicknamed “The O.G.” and who, in addition to building Whisk Me Away’s kitchen, attends all of the Newport Farmers Markets. “He sets up at 8am so I can arrive at 8:30 with the baked goods,” she explains, “and if I have to leave early to deliver orders, he stays to pack up and tells me what the sales were.” Gray’s family is a beautiful demonstration of what love in action can look like.

But when it comes to baking, Gray is the master of her domain. Although I’d willingly throw myself in front of a moving vehicle for one of her cake jars, they are (quite literally) the mere crumbs of her main event: wedding cakes, birthday cakes, special occasion cakes. She also wholesales chocolate brownies and brown butter and maple walnut blondies (find them at Hometown Poké and Stock Culinary Goods), and on Saturday mornings at Whisk, you can purchase cinnamon buns, fruit-filled strudels and beer bread made with Buttonwoods Brewery Helles beer.

 “Everything in pastry is fun, but there’s nothing like decorating a cake,” Gray says. It’s her joy to have someone come in with an idea and let her roll with it. And now that she’s hired her first employee, she (and her parents) may just get a little more sleep, but there will still be singing and dancing in the kitchen. “It still hasn’t set in that people come back to me for things,” she says. “When someone says, ‘It’s the best cake I’ve ever eaten,’ I think — wait, this cake? The one I made you?” She pulls a fresh loaf of bread from the oven and wraps it to go. “Food brings people together, and it’s the coolest feeling in the world to be able to make the thing that brings people together.”  

It sounds like she’s performing a bit of therapy for our community after all.

560 Mineral Spring Ave, Pawtucket; 9am-2pm Saturdays. @whiskmeawayri