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ORAL HISTORY
Monica Chatterton
Flake Baby Pastry
Monica Chatterton grew up in St. Francisville, Louisiana, before moving to Central Arkansas to attend Hendrix College. After completing her undergraduate degree in 2013, Chatterton began working for restaurants around Little Rock—including The Root Cafe, where she began experimenting with flaky pop-tarts she called “flake babies.” Her Instagram posts about the pastries quickly earned her a robust social media following—along with DM’d requests for baked goods—which encouraged her to begin selling flakes and other baked goods out of her home kitchen under the name “Flake Baby.”
After several years of trying to balance working full-time restaurant jobs with Flake Baby, Chatterton finally decided to strike out on her own in June 2020, just months after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although she had reservations about the financial variability of selling specialty pastries during the pandemic, the opposite proved true. In March 2023, a few months after this interview, she took on a role developing an in-house pastry program for The Bagel Shop, a Little Rock pop-up-turned-brick-and-mortar bakery. Just over a year later, however, she returned to running Flake Baby full-time, (this time with a focus on cakes).
