While Chardon boasts several mom-and-pop businesses and continues to grow its local base, it has been missing one key ingredient — a proper bakery.
While Chardon boasts several mom-and-pop businesses and continues to grow its local base, it has been missing one key ingredient — a proper bakery.
But Kevin Keough aimed to change that, recently opening Kevin is Always Mixing on Cherry Avenue, which sells traditional baked goods, such as pies, muffins and cookies; as well as popular signature artisan dessert jars, Keough’s main staple.
The jars are glass, come in two sizes — 8 and 16 ounces — and offer a variety of fillings and flavors, the ingredients of which Keough emphasized are fresh.
“It’s not your typical graham cracker cheesecake type of a deal. We mix it up,” Keough said, explaining what goes into the jars. Each contains a pie, cake or cheesecake mousse filling, along with freshly-made whipped cream and a crust made from sweet ingredients like Oreos or animal crackers.
Some of Keough’s creations are showcased on the bakery’s website, displaying flavors such as peanut butter pie, peach mousse, pineapple upside-down cake and pumpkin cheesecake mousse.
“I started doing traditional desserts years ago,” he said. “And one night, for whatever reason, it popped in my head, ‘What if we put this in a glass jar and made the serving easy.’”
He found the alteration aided in both the serving and storing of his desserts.
Keough’s motivation for using glass jars was environmental sustainability.
“My daughter and wife pushed for it,” he said. “They said, ‘If we’re gonna do this, we’re doing recyclable glass, we’re not doing plastic jars.’ So we’ve stayed true to that commitment.”
Keough’s wife and daughter both work in the shop, his wife joining him on weekends and his daughter when she is home from college.
“It’s my creation, but it came to be because of them, too,” Keough said.
Hailing from the Burton area, Keough ended up opening a bakery in Chardon primarily by chance. After multiple years of catering, enough demand grew to warrant having a physical location, he said, adding a bakery requires a commercial kitchen and there was a spot in Chardon that matched his needs.
Keough, whose day job is in sales, was a hobby baker for many years before entering the profession.
“If I went to a bakery and it wasn’t good, I was so disappointed,” he recalled. “So, I just decided to kind of figure out my own. And then I liked it and could eat it, and that’s how it got to be. And so for years, we just tried to perfect a few things and here we are.”
The bakery currently offers 30 flavors, with seasonal ones rotated out about every six weeks. Keough describes the process of coming up with new flavors as a matter of suggestion, trial and error.
“It’s conversations with people,” Keough said. “(They) talk about, ‘why don’t you think about doing this,’ or ‘what about a white chocolate called snowball silk,’ stuff like that, and then all of a sudden a couple of days later, it just pops.”
For Keough, baking taps into his creative mind.
“You can do whatever you want. It’s like art,” he said. “You come in and throw paint on the wall and see if it looks good.”
Even with the bakery open, Keough is still doing catering and special orders, and welcomes people to reach out to him for events.
Kevin is Always Mixing, at 106 Cherry Avenue, is currently open Thursdays and Fridays from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., though they are looking to expand to more days in the future.
Their menu is available on the business’s Facebook page and they can be contacted via their website, www.kevinisalwaysmixing.com.
