As seniors Felicia Huang and Seth Leung open up the oven, the warm and sweet, brownie-scented air fills the kitchen, ready to be packaged for this month’s customers. Cutting through the chocolate pastry and placing them into custom packaging, the duo prepare the brownies to be picked up by students. Through their variety of affordable dessert options, Big Buns Bakery brings convenient sweet treats to Lynbrook’s campus.
Originally, they had developed their interest in baking independently. Huang gave sweet treats to her volleyball teammates, classmates, friends and even teachers, delighted to see others enjoy the sweets she made.
Leung found his passion for baking through a different path, developing his interest because of his mother.
“My mother’s a baker and her dream is to open a bakery one day,” Leung said. “I grew up learning a lot from her. Many of my recipes are modified versions of her recipes.”
Being in the same history class in junior year, they noticed that they both often brought baked goods to share and decided to collaborate, merging their passions for baking. Eventually, Huang and Leung decided to turn this activity into a business so they could earn enough to cover the expenses of ingredients. One of their main goals was to sell items at low prices, especially since most commercially sold pastries are quite expensive.
“We wanted to make our products cheap and affordable without losing money,” Huang said.
Every month, Big Buns Bakery releases a new menu for customers to order from. The menu contains a standard cookie option, which changes flavor according to the month. In August and September, the featured flavors were matcha and S’mores, respectively. In addition to these products, Big Buns Bakery also has exclusive monthly pastries.
“We try to have two to three unique menu items every month,” Leung said. “We take recommendations for items from our friends and customers. We also include things that we personally like.”
In the first month of being in business, the bakery saw great success in sales, with over 40 sales. Many of the students who ordered greatly enjoyed the pastries.
“I had ordered the pineapple bun, which was very delicious,” freshman Richard Yu said. “The texture was nice — it was soft on the inside, and crunchy on the outside. The packaging even had cute stickers.”
However, the bakery ran into a couple unexpected issues along the way. On their Instagram page, @bigbuns._bakery, a Google form is linked where customers can input their orders for the month. Since the form was available to students throughout the whole month, Huang and Leung were met with a lot of confusion.
“We just had our first month, which was all over the place,” Leung said. “Since orders were constantly coming in, we had to bake in multiple sessions.”
In order to combat these issues, they planned on only releasing the order form at the beginning of the month for a few days to minimize the amount of sessions needed to bake. They also plan on deciding on a single pickup location and time for customers.
Huang and Leung aim to benefit the student body not only with the sweets but also through the profits generated from sales by donating to clubs. The duo have also decided to donate to a local nonprofit, Jumpstart Sports Foundation, which provides sports equipment to marginalized communities.
“Jumpstart Sports Foundation is an organization run by students at our school,” Huang said. “They donate sports equipment and other resources to marginalized communities. It’s meaningful because I do sports and I hope others get the same opportunity as well.”
With the newfound success of their business, Huang and Leung hope to reach a greater audience, allowing more people to enjoy their low-cost sweets. As sales increase, they also hope to donate and support more students as they continue to pursue their passion in baking.
