By Joe Hadsall
Globe Features Editor
JOPLIN, Mo. —
If you are fans of baked goods from Hazel’s Bakery -- run by Kay McLaughlin and her husband, Bill -- at the Webb City Farmers Market, then you’ll want to see Bert Ott.
Ott, the owner of Black Forest Bakery, will be bestowed with Kay McLaughlin’s carrot cake recipe, said Eileen Nichols, director of the market.
Apparently, the closure of the McLaughlins’ bakery caused something of an uproar.
“She was not ever known to hand out a recipe before,” said Nichols. “Their customers are devoted, and she and Bill are highly respected.”
The two market fixtures recently served their last meals and sold their last pies in July. After becoming a fixture at the market for 10 years, the couple have retired.
Love of cooking
The McLaughlins have lived at their Hereford Road house, south of Joplin, for 43 years. Married in 1963, the couple raised five children as Bill, now 73, worked in The Joplin Globe’s press room --Êa career he kept for 55 years.
Kay McLaughlin, 68, worked odd jobs as a homemaker. She worked as a server at Waffle House and took photos for the Joplin Board of Realtors.
All that time, she cooked.
Thanks to her mother, Hazel, Kay developed a love for working in the kitchen, from baking to canning. And because she had a large family, she rarely made food in small quantities.
“I don’t know how to make a little bit of something,” Kay said. “When you have five kids, you make a lot of whatever you’re making.”
When she made pies for the family, she didn’t make just one.
And she still doesn’t -- her family now includes her children’s spouses and 24 grandchildren.
But the amounts she cooked were nothing compared to what she and Bill would prepare.
To market, to market
Kay got involved with the farmers market in about 2000. She sold plants grown in her greenhouse. But later that first year, she overheard Nichols say that the market was in need of a baker.
After agreeing to help, Nichols recommended bringing five to eight pies to sell, Kay said. She brought 12, and all of them sold.
“Pretty quickly,” she said. “And it went from there. People liked the products, and I enjoyed doing it.”
Naming her business after her mother, she started Hazel’s Bakery, fine-tuned her own recipes and sold baked goods every Tuesday and Friday at the market. Bill also got into the act -- after his retirement, he made quickbreads and cookies.
The two would bake like crazy on Sunday and Monday for Tuesday’s market, then do the same thing on Wednesday and Thursday for Friday’s market. Sometimes they would bake through the night without any sleep.
McLaughlin said she relied on a fellow market seller for one of her other famous recipes. She used peaches from John Pate’s orchard for her peach pies.
The operation got so big that they converted an inherited mobile home into a commercial kitchen. But they didn’t stick to baked goods -- they also served Friday dinners sold at the market from 2005 to 2009. In 2007, they also prepared the Saturday breakfast.
They didn’t become millionaires, Kay said, but they pulled some good profits -- enough to keep the inherited mobile home.
“When we inherited that, we also inherited the payments,” Kay said.
Nichols said their numbers were astounding. Her strawberry rhubarb pies were popular, and her other fruit pies were just as delicious, she said.
“People swore by her pies,” Nichols said. “Her crusts were fabulous. And she’d use fresh fruits.”
A picture of McLaughlin selling pies, shown during a recent retirement celebration, shows a table with maybe a dozen pies on it. Nichols said the picture got plenty of laughs, because the amount of baked goods was so light and sparse.
“They were doing massive cooking,” Nichols said. “They were producing 36 to 42 pies, the same number of cakes and a lot of other baked goods.”
Nichols said that they typically served 80 to 100 meals every Friday. Kay also served on the market’s board of directors.
And the family got into the act -- Nichols said a nephew and two of their sons also sold at the market.
“They had an impact,” Nichols said. “At one point, we thought we should call this the McLaughlin market.”
Catching up
Kay said the energy required to keep up that level finally caught up to the McLaughlins -- enough for them to decide to retire. This year they scaled back to working only the Friday market.
During one of their final weeks at the market, they prepared for Fourth of July crowds. Thanks to other events, Bill and Kay had two days to bake more than 50 pies, 30 cakes, 44 quickbreads and 80 dozen cookies.
“If you think that’s easy to do in two days, you try it sometime,” Kay said, laughing. “I rested up for a week after that.”
That is also when they decided to call it quits, she said.
The couple are preparing for some well-earned downtime, Kay said. She joked that Bill has a long “honey do” list.
Kay also plans to dive into genealogy and to write her own cookbook. But the more immediate thing she’ll tackle is surgery -- she is scheduled for a knee replacement.
Once she recovers from that, she said she plans to take up tap dancing again.
“I’m not going to give up and croak,” she said. “I think it’s a good plan. The doctor has to say ‘yes,’ but I tapped when I was young and I’ve missed it. I’ve thought about doing it for the last 10 years, but I haven’t had the time.”
She and Bill may return to the market next year, as well -- as volunteers, not bakers, however. That means getting one of their strawberry rhubarb pies may be difficult.
No worries, Kay said. She’ll tell anyone who wants to know the recipe.
“It’s not hard,” she said. “I’ll tell ’em where to get the strawberries and the rhubarb.”
