As the owner of Pan Bakery, Kimberly Fraser has a reputation for unusual flavours.

Typical offerings for cookies and cupcakes include matcha, Reese’s peanut butter with caramel and marshmallow (a mouthful just to say), and witches’ brew s’mores.

She has a confession, however.

“My favourite cookie flavour is chocolate chip,” she said. “I really don’t eat a lot of cookies with unusual flavours.”

That does not stop the Sandys resident from experimenting for the benefit of her customers. Right now, she is working on chai-flavoured cookies to complement chai lattes.

“I often see something unusual and think, ‘I wonder if that would work in an icing or a cookie’,” she said.

Last summer, she made a cupcake with swizzle icing.

“It’s amazing what you can do,” she said.

Her baked goods are sold at venues such as Il Pomodoro in Sandys and Lookie Lookie in the Washington Mall in Hamilton.

Ms Fraser first launched Pan Bakery in 2019.

“Then the pandemic happened, and I got pregnant,” she said. “There was a lot going on, so I put it on pause.”

Last November, it was time to try again.

“I said let me be consistent with it and see how it goes,” she said. “Everything has been going well ever since.”

However, it has not been easy running a home bakery while raising two daughters, aged 8 and 3.

“They love to help, but sometimes their help is not really help at all,” Ms Fraser laughed.

So she waits until they are asleep to start baking.

“I just have to make sure I do not fall asleep with them,” she said.

She tries to pre-prep to make the process go more smoothly, but still, she is often baking at 3am or 4am.

That’s in addition to the 40 hours a week she does for the Marketplace as a merchandising and scanning co-ordinator.

“I decided to go part-time a month ago so I could have a balance and not get overwhelmed,” she said.

To ward off sleep deprivation, she naps whenever she can.

Eventually, she would like to run Pan Bakery full-time.

“I have always loved baking,” she said.

When she was 11, her mother put her in charge of the baked eats for the family’s regular Sunday dinners.

“I was excited,” she said. “Baking is usually something you are either really good at or really not good at. It can be very finicky. I regard it almost as a science.”