Sayre, Pa. resident Kurt Priester, is busy making Whoopie. (Photo by Keri Blakinger)
Kurt Priester loves making whoopie. He loves it so much that some nights he spends four or five hours making whoopie. He’s even named his business Kurt’s Making Whoopie.
Don’t be alarmed, though – the Sayre resident’s business is not nearly as naughty as it sounds. Priester sells homemade whoopie pies.
As a child, Priester found a love for baking through his father. Like his father, Priester’s full-time job is teaching, so baking is a side hobby.
Although he always enjoyed baking, Priester started Kurt’s Making Whoopie mostly as a joke, so he could tell people he was making whoopie. Once he got started, though, the joke took off: “It just sort of kept growing and growing and at some point I looked back and said, ‘Wow this is more than just a hobby.’”
Kurt’s Making Whoopie officially started in August of 2013, when Priester completed the necessary state and local regulatory approval processes to begin selling his baked goods to the public.
Priester has developed his own recipes for the business, but he said that he started by altering other people’s recipes. He said, “You start out looking at other people’s recipes and then you start turning them into your own. I think by now I can call them my own.”
Although they are his own, they aren’t top secret. Priester is working on a cookbook – entirely comprised of whoopie pie recipes.
Priester will have a natural outlet for selling such books, because about twice a month he goes to fairs and expos to sell his goods. In addition to selling locally in Pennsylvania, he also attends events in Broome and Tioga counties. Although he puts in a lot of hard work, the baker attributes a lot of his success to the product itself: “I’m not a very business-minded person. I’ve been lucky I think, having a product that’s different, a little bit odd certainly helps.”
His modesty about his business prowess is perhaps belied by the scale of his operation. In a normal week Priester makes around 240 whoopie pies – 20 dozen. However, on weeks when he does fairs or expos, he makes about twice that.
To accommodate his massive need for whoopie, Priester actually built a commercial kitchen on the back of his home. He said, “That was a big step. That was a big leap into insanity when you add that onto your house.”
Even with the bulk baking ability that a commercial kitchen offers, Priester still spends four to five hours a day baking. Some of that time is devoted to creating new flavors.
Generally, his best-selling flavor is chocolate with salted peanut butter filling. For shows, he said, “I make twice as much of that as I do anything else.”
Priester also has a number of seasonal flavors, including pumpkin and cream cheese in the fall, a strawberry-based flavor called Summertime Whoopie for the warmer months, and a gingerbread-based winter holiday flavor. For Easter, he’s featuring a Cadbury egg flavor that has a yellow yolk in the center.
“The adults like the ones with the alcohol in them,” he said. Priester has mudslide, Irish coffee, and margarita flavors. What’s in a margarita whoopie pie? Priester explained, “They’re lime cake with a tequila butter cream frosting and a sprinkle of salt across the top.”
Priester also makes thematic whoopies and custom flavors per request. He said, “The most popular request right now is I did Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle whoopies and as soon as I posted them online I have gotten a bunch of orders.” The Ninja Turtles whoopies use vanilla cakes with vanilla filling, but the cake is colored green and the filling is colored to march the four turtles’ headbands. After making the whoopie, Priester turns it on the side and puts candy eyes on the frosting “so it looks just like their headbands.”
To learn more about Priester or to order some whoopie, check out www.kurtsmakingwhoopie.com.
