- It always warms my heart every single time.
They say, this makes me feel
just like when I was at my grandmother's house.
Ultimately, for me, it's about expressing love to people
in the way of baking.
It's not a big thing.
It's not overly complicated.
It's really just about where's your heart?
I'm Devonna Banks.
I reside in Pasadena, California
and I'm the proud owner of Butter Bakery.
I've owned a business before
but it has nothing to do with baking at all.
The challenge was that you have to have a job obviously
so you can take care of your children
and have a roof over your head and blah blah blah
but I needed something for me.
I needed to be full.
I baked a lot but I didn't really think of it
as a business per se, not at first.
I just thought I love this so much
and all I wanna do is bake every single day.
It wasn't a thing of oh,
I'm just gonna open a bakery business.
I didn't think about that at all.
I didn't feel like that was where I was drawn to
or that this is the business that I should go into
or any of those things.
It was more about oh, this is something I think is fun,
this is something that I love to do anyway
and it wasn't until I saw
that people really liked the things that I make
from a perspective of oh, I'll pay for it.
Butter Bakery is the taste of warm chocolate chip cookies.
It's delectable butter pound cakes.
It's warm even peach cobbler and ice cream.
It's all the things that you have
in the comfort of being at your grandma's house.
That's who we are, that's what we do.
As much as I would love, I would love very much
to have a brick and mortar but it's a little challenging
trying to find an actual space for the business,
very much online presence currently.
We're not operating in one set place.
It's either commercial kitchens.
I've even used schools.
I've used church kitchens, my own kitchen.
It's just, I'm all over the place right now
just getting it done, making things work.
So the challenge in that
is having to take everything you have everywhere you go
so you have just lots of stuff to lug every single day.
I just kinda feel
like people don't really respect your business
if they don't see it in an actual building.
People tend to not take you seriously.
So they think, she just, this is a hobby
and it's really not.
Baking is something that I love and I love every day
that I wake up before the sun gets up.
Regardless of what things come my way,
none of that really matters to me
because I love what I do
and I'm super passionate about it every single day
no matter what that looks like
and even if it seems to other people like it's a challenge
or that it's frustrating or what have you,
nothing in me, nothing outside of me
makes me feel like ugh, I don't wanna do this anymore
'cause every day this is all I wanna do.
I just wanna get up and I wanna bake
and I wanna do what I do and that's it.
So there is no real challenge if you will, not for me,
not to me.
So right now I'm waiting, waiting for a building.
I've already submitted a letter of intent
and so hopefully they'll come back to me before the new year
and well, I don't know if I should say that
because of the timing but yeah.
So it's been about a month since we interviewed last
and from that point till now,
the property management company reached out
and offered me the building.
So I'm super excited
that Butter Bakery will now have its own space.
From a personal level, all of this is surreal.
It doesn't even seem like a reality
for Butter Bakery though.
It feels like it's supposed to be.
When I started Butter Bakery,
I had a five pound bag of sugar, a five pound bag of flour,
I had a pack of butter and I thought,
this five pound bag of sugar right here
will eventually become 5000 pounds.
If there's something that you love,
it's something that's way on the inside,
it doesn't matter what people think,
it doesn't matter what people say,
it doesn't matter what people make you feel like
even in that moment.
If you love it enough, do it.
Don't allow your drive and your passion
and your love for something to go to the grave with you.
Don't go there with regret.
Leave it for everybody else.
That's why you have it.
All of these things are deposited in us
for the benefit of everybody around us.
I would like to be able to touch people.
I would like to be able to touch them in their heart
with just the little things that I do
and to me they seem small.
This is just what I do every day
but sometimes that's all that matters.
Sometimes that's all that really is needed.
Sometimes people just need cookies 'cause cookies are good.
Inevitably, I know that working as hard as I do
that I will get the things that I want from this
so that's why I keep doing it.
I'm Devonna Banks, the proud owner of Butter Bakery
where things are always homemade from scratch.
- [Narrator] Oh yes.
(calm music)