French macarons are considered one of the most difficult baked goods to produce, and Susan Rice likes a challenge.
Susan Rice took over Mom with a Measuring Cup in 2024 and sells small batches of French macarons in the Fairbanks and North Pole communities.
French macarons are made with egg whites, almond flour, powdered sugar and a meringue base.
“They’re very persnickety,” she said.
Rice is the executive director of Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival, a former school administrator and teacher, a baker and a mom to two.
Rice grew up on a homestead near North Pole. Her family would come to town about once a month for groceries, and her mom taught her to bake bread and make pancakes on a wood stove.
“I’ve always been sort of a hobby baker,” she said. As a kid she enjoyed knitting, cross stitching and sewing. “Nothing kind of spoke to me in the same way that baking did.”
While she made cakes and cookies, she also challenged herself to bake desserts she considered fancy, like cream puffs and pies.
“I was always making weird stuff,” she said.
Some of her early baking creations, like cinnamon rolls with m&m’s inside, were entered into the Tanana Valley State Fair.
“It was always like a hot take on something,” she said. “I wasn’t always super successful.”
Her hobby of baking for friends and family continued. Her husband, Tim, likes coconut cream pies and his grandfather started Shamrock Bakery & Cafe in Anchorage.
Around the same time Rice was planning to move back to Fairbanks, baker Poppy Floto was moving and looking to sell Mom with a Measuring Cup. Rice and Floto had gone to Lathrop High School together, and found that it was perfect timing for Rice to purchase the business in July 2024.
“I hadn’t actually made macarons before,” Rice said. After a stressful season, Rice said that “I really was trying to look for reclaiming some joy in my life.”
Rice read books, watched tutorials and practiced making macarons for about three months.
“I had some really, really awful results,” she said. After she got some coaching from Floto, she finally had a perfect batch.
Rice calls her mistakes “maca-wrongs” and said that making macarons has been a learning experience.
She inherited some of Floto’s customers and first wowed them with pumpkin spice cheesecake macarons in August.
Rice said Floto focused on taste, so she wants to maintain Mom with a Measuring Cup’s reputation of selling delicious macarons.
“I think there are a lot of macarons that are really beautiful, and some that are kind of bland,” Rice said. “She (Floto) really wanted things to be like three bites of heaven.”
“One simple bite that’s really going to sit on your palate,” is Rice’s goal.
Rice commandeers her kitchen to bake macarons, so her family is in the process of converting a basement workroom at their home into a baking area for Mom with a Measuring Cup.
Rice developed a monthly variety box for $25. She accepts preorders for ten macarons with five flavors based on the theme of the month.
The theme for March is St. Patrick’s Day, so Rice made macarons arranged in a rainbow with touches of gold.
Rice considers some of her macarons to be “wild, modern and funky.”
She’s sold an aurora borealis macaron with French vanilla filling rolled in pop rocks. “It’s like the colors of the aurora but it’s a surprise in your mouth,” she said.
For Halloween, she made a sour monster with monster faces and blue raspberry filling rolled in citric acid that tasted like a sour gummy bear. She also made a “Sweeney Todd” themed macaron with what looked like blood splatter.
She hosts pop ups at local businesses and exclusively wholesales at The Roaming Root Cellar on College Road.
Rice also makes custom orders starting at $36. “I love the challenge of custom orders,” she said. She said she likes when customers ask for “wild and unusual” flavors or themes, and that she can make macarons in almost any flavor.
She made hundreds of custom macarons for a champagne tasting event at Lavelle’s Bistro and a Denali State Bank annual party.
“I love when customers bring me the wild and crazy requests,” she said.
Baking and decorating macarons is one of the ways Rice expresses her creativity.
“I think creativity comes in many forms,” she said. “As a classically trained musician I don’t see myself as a visual artist, but this is a very visual medium. I love the challenge.”
One of her fan favorites is a crème brulée. Instead of using standard buttercream, she uses a French vanilla buttercream recipe primarily made from egg yolks and sugar. “You get a really custardy vanilla,” she said. “It’s a really rich custard.”
Her fans also like her double lemon, which she makes using her grandmother’s lemon curd recipe.
For more information, visit bakesy.shop/b/mom-with-a-measuring-cup or following Mom with a Measuring Cup on FaceBook.
