Why We Bake
It was never really about the cookies. And it was always entirely about the cookies. Both things are true — and understanding why is the key to understanding Wonderfully Made.
It started in Kitty’s kitchen.
Nearly two years before Wonderfully Made had a name, a nonprofit status, or a space at Peachtree Church, Kitty had already started. She visited a program in Kansas City that had organized itself around baking — around the idea that shared work in a kitchen builds something that no curriculum can manufacture. She came home understanding exactly why it worked.
I understood it differently when she explained it to me. I heard the business logic: baking produces a real product with real market value. It creates a repeatable revenue stream. It gives participants a skill that transfers to employment. It is inherently scalable. All of that is true and all of it mattered when we were figuring out how to build something sustainable.
But Kitty’s reason was simpler and more profound than mine: baking builds friendship. The particular intimacy of standing next to someone at a counter, measuring and mixing and waiting and tasting — it creates connection that is hard to replicate any other way. You can’t bake together at arm’s length.
Both reasons are right. That’s usually how it works with Kitty and me.
The Wonderfully Made Bakery is now a permanent, operating commercial kitchen in the renovated Lodge space on the Peachtree Church campus. The Wonder Makers bake chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal raisin, white chocolate macadamia nut, gluten free varieties, and seasonal flavors — including a pumpkin snickerdoodle that has developed a devoted following. A bakery externship program is now offering real kitchen training for culinary students, creating an inclusive professional environment that no traditional externship can replicate.
“They love having a job.”
That was volunteer Emily Simpson, describing a Tuesday morning when Matthew helped to bag 300 cookies with steady focus, disposed of the parchment, put away the pan, and picked up the next tray. Nobody asked him to. He simply knew what the job required and did it.
This is what baking gives the Wonder Makers that a typical activity cannot: it produces something real. The cookies are purchased by real people for real occasions. When a Wonder Maker packages an order, they are not practicing a skill for some future application. They are doing the work, right now, that will bring someone joy when they open the box.
Some of the Wonder Makers have gone on to work in commercial bakeries and food service. Lele works at Crumbl Cookie and runs Baking with Lele, her own home bakery. Maya works at Steeple Cafe. The skills built in Kitty’s kitchen and now in the Wonderfully Made Bakery are not hypothetical. They transfer. They compound.
But here is what I want to be honest about, because it shapes everything: the cookies are not the mission. The community is the mission. Baking is the how. The Wonder Makers are not here to produce output. They are here to belong. The cookies are the means by which belonging gets built — the shared task that fills a Tuesday morning with purpose and laughter and the satisfaction of pulling something good out of an oven together.
Every cookie you order carries that. Every batch was mixed by hands that belong to someone who is fearfully and wonderfully made and wanted you to know it.
Order a box. Taste what we’re building.
Order cookies from the Wonderfully Made Bakery
Chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, white chocolate macadamia nut, gluten free options, and seasonal flavors — baked with purpose, delivered with joy. Order at wonderfullymadecommunity.org/bakery.