After half a century of helping Lexingtonians celebrate their special occasions, Magee's Bakery has its own reason to celebrate this year. The local institution is marking 50 sugar-scented years in business, having lured generations of Lexingtonians into its East Main Street location to buy birthday cakes or grab a doughnut and coffee to go.
Lexington was a much smaller town when Leslie Magee, from Maysville, incorporated his first local bakery in 1956. Neither IBM nor the Chandler Medical Center had yet arrived. Magee later added bakery locations in Gardenside, Eastland, and Southland before selling the business to Ralph Higgins and Don Hurt in 1969. Higgins had worked in accounting, and his wife, Joyce, had a lot of customer service experience from working in banking.
About 1978, Higgins and Hurt ended their partnership. The Higginses kept the bakery's main location, its present day site. The bakery was smaller then, as the building shared space with other businesses, including a hair salon and an extra office for Thompson & Riley Auctioneers. Eventually, the Higgins family expanded Magee's to incorporate the entire building. With the extra space, there was room to serve breakfast and lunch orders.
After Ralph Higgins passed away, Joyce Higgins became the head of the business in 1992. She and her daughter, Beverly, supervise a staff of 20 employees, many of them part-time. Joyce's son, Gregory, isn't involved with the bakery every day, but helps out when needed.
Today, stepping inside the front door of Magee's feels like walking into a European coffeehouse. The exposed brick walls, natural wood ceiling beams, and the dark wood trim on the counters give the store a casual, welcoming atmosphere. Wooden tables and chairs for eat-in customers take up most of the space in the front area, extending from the windows overlooking the street to the back counter where customers place their orders.
To one side is the coffee bar and breakfast bar. The other side is bordered with display cases of luscious cakes and baker's racks holding pre-packaged desserts: trays of six cupcakes, chess tarts, and decorated cookies. Aside from the traditional decorated birthday cakes with buttercream icing, Magee's sells seven different cakes: German Chocolate, Italian Cream, Red Velvet, Hummingbird, Angel Food, Carrot, and Cheese.
The coffee bar and breakfast bar draw a lot of morning customers on their way to work. Choices include several types of coffee, lattes, espresso, ham or sausage biscuits, breakfast quiche or casserole, juice, doughnuts, and pastries. Most breakfast orders are take out. Serving lots of people in a hurry can be a challenge, Joyce Higgins said, but she doesn't mind. "I love it when we're busy."
Magee's also delivers breakfast to groups of Lexingtonians involved in early morning meetings, particularly at local hospitals. Coffee is sent in special insulated containers that keep it hot for four to five hours.
Lunchtime brings both takeout and eat-in orders, and those who linger can now surf the net with Magee's recently added Wi-Fi wireless Internet access. Chicken salad is the most popular sandwich, although customers can also choose turkey, country ham, olive nut, pimento cheese, egg salad, or tuna salad.
Business increases for Magee's on the weekends of University of Kentucky home football games. Tailgaters order lots of the bakery's shortbread cookies decorated with wildcat faces or paws.
As holiday entertaining season begins, it's not visions of sugarplums that are dancing in the heads of Joyce Higgins and her staff. They are more likely to be thinking of fruitcakes, butter biscuits, and iced Christmas tree cookies. Magee's bakes each of its three holiday cakes in one- and two-pound sizes. Greg Higgins mixes the fruitcake by hand. It's a simple recipe, his mother said, "with really good fruit." The jam cake is made with blackberry jam and topped with a cooked caramel frosting. The pecan cake, similar to a fruitcake, contains only pecans and pineapple and is topped with a glaze.
Customer demand for beaten biscuits for country ham and other party sandwiches has declined steadily, replaced by orders for butter biscuits. These yeast biscuits are also called Parker House rolls. A holiday party needs holiday cookies, so Magee's sells large and medium trays of assorted decorated sugar cookies.
Pecan and transparent pies are available year-round, but pie season begins around Thanksgiving, when other types of pies are added. Granny Smith apple, pumpkin, chocolate cream, and coconut cream pies are eagerly snapped up by customers.
At an age when many business owners would take it easy, Joyce Higgins still works almost every day. The best part of owning a bakery, she said, "is being able to greet people and take care of them." The hardest part? "I'm tired at the end of the day, but it's a good tired-the kind that means you've done something."