https://mackays-bakery.myshopify.com/

MacKay’s Bakery, Pickering, ON (2026)

09/03/2026

For years, I have treated summer as the bakery’s slowest season, the stretch when things ease up enough for us to breathe, regroup, and accept that patios and beaches might temporarily outrank dessert.

This summer made a complete liar out of me. We broke records, the porch became busier than ever, and the usual summer pause never arrived. We normally take holidays during this season, but this year we never found the opportunity to step away, and I mean that with enormous gratitude.

It also made one thing clear: running an extraordinarily busy bakery from our house is a logistical Tetris experiment. As we move toward autumn, winter and, with Christmas is already occupying rent in my mind, the strategic part of me is looking closely at what comes next. Growth is beautiful, but it also has to be sustainable enough that the people behind it are still standing.

Most nights, awake until midnight, and most mornings begin with the sun. People often remind me that we could make less, let the fridge sell out, and call that a successful day. They are right. The problem is that I am constitutionally incapable of not imagining the person arriving for a birthday treat, a particular sweet they have been thinking about all week, or something promised to a child, only to discover that it is gone.

That instinct has also meant pushing through some substantial realities behind the fridge. After a diagnosis of a serious and rare autoimmune illness and a complicated year of treatment, I am finally doing decently, but I currently have a medication-related stress fracture in my foot and am technically supposed to stay off it. Apparently our household believes in matching injuries, because my husband is also home with a fractured wrist. We are a fine pair; thank goodness our three year old wants to be a doctor.

08/26/2026

My signature is an alchemy of ink, intention, and accountability, transforming something as simple as a name into a promise about the way I choose to build. When I place that name beside a decision, offering, or commitment, I accept the responsibility that comes with having it remain attached to what follows.

I built MacKay’s on trust, and Shop the Fridge is the clearest expression of that belief. You walk up to our porch, choose what you would like, pay through an honour system, and carry something home. I trust you with my home, and you trust me to make something worth your drive. That reciprocity feels old-fashioned in the best way because each of us extends something before receiving anything in return.

The heart of this bakery is shaped by what I think of as its social architecture, the invisible string that forms when people choose one another often enough that familiarity becomes belonging. It grows through repeated drives down the same street, porch conversations, family traditions, celebrations, and the moment someone says, “I brought my kid this time.” None of that could be manufactured, you built it with me.

My academic training taught me to study systems through risk, harm, accountability, behaviour, and human response. You might imagine that years spent examining what can go wrong would make me distrustful, but my faith in people’s goodness remains unshaken. I believe trust can be thoughtful without becoming suspicious, and there is moral significance in extending it first. Shop the Fridge is not naïveté, it is a deliberate expression of what I believe about people.

I want growth to feel like an extension of our origin rather than a departure from it. Care should scale without becoming impersonal, trust should scale without becoming transactional, humanity should scale without becoming performative, and integrity should remain recognizable.

Every dessert that leaves the fridge enters someone world, whether it lands on a birthday table, rides home in a passenger seat, or sweetens an ordinary afternoon. If my name is on something, I want that stamp to mean something.

My signature is in ink, and I want it to remain worthy of each of you.

08/26/2026

My mom is a person of grace, extraordinary discipline, and relentless realism, and she has always had a remarkable way of making love feel practical, dependable, and deeply rooted. She stayed home with me, helped me become myself, and later trusted me enough to invest beside me when I was still young and building my career, long before MacKay’s existed and long before there was any evidence of where any of this might lead. She and I had already learned how to build things together, how to take risks together, and how to believe in something before its full shape was visible.

She used to tell me that life would widen, that one day I would grow up, get married, have children, and that the enormous promises I made to her as a child would naturally find a different place in my life as my priorities expanded. I stubbornly told her they would not, and I meant it.

There are many things I have changed my mind about over the years, but loyalty has never been one of them. I was her daughter long before I became a wife, a mother, or a business owner, and when I tell someone I am going to stand beside them, I mean it.

Now, years later, I understand her differently because I am a mother too, and I understand what it means to give someone your days, to help shape a life while it is still becoming, and to support a dream simply because it matters to the person you love. Somewhere along the way, the bakery became one more thing we built together, and I think that is part of why 10,000 feels so significant to me now. The number did not come when I became better at performing what I thought a business should be; it came when I became more exact about who I already was, when I let the colours get brighter, the history become more visible, the family become more central, and the person behind the business become inseparable from the business itself.

The number is beautiful, but what moves me most is that the fuller the portrait became, the more people seemed to recognize something in it. My mom is still beside me, my family is still woven through the work, and the colours are brighter now because they are finally completely mine.

My signature is in ink, no erasies.

08/26/2026

10,000.

Ten thousand feels like the moment when the world lifts into a brighter register, when the landscape comes into full colour and the shape that has been forming for years finally becomes unmistakable. I keep thinking about it as a rainbow gathering slowly across the horizon, one colour at a time, until suddenly the whole spectrum is visible and you can finally understand the scale of how much has been growing. I have spent days trying to find language worthy of this number, and every time I do, I come back to family, identity, and the clarity that really only arrived for me this year.

For a long time, I think I was still negotiating with an invisible audience about what a business was supposed to look like, how professional it should sound, what parts of myself belonged inside it, and which parts should remain separate. This year, I finally stopped doing that and gave myself permission to run this business in a way that felt entirely mine. I brought in the pinks, pulled more deliberately from my historical lineage, talked more openly about generational care, motherhood, health, belief systems, creativity, memory, and the parts of life that do not fit neatly inside a bakery box. I wanted the person you met on the porch and the person you read online to feel completely continuous, so that every space reflected the same version of who I am. What you are seeing here is genuinely me, in all the different ways I exist at once, and I think that has changed the way I understand both the business and myself.

At the centre of that story has always been my family. Many of you see the family I have built now when you step onto our porch, because you see my husband, my daughter, my pup and the feeling of our home, and all the little evidence that this bakery lives here with us. What you may not realize is that the family that built me is literally on the other side of the street. My parents are there, in the house I grew up in, and while both of them have shaped every part of who I am, this part of the story belongs especially to my mom.

08/23/2026

Welcome to MacKay’s Trading Post.

All this conversation about trade lately has me analyzing its oldest premise: you have something I value, I have something you value, and somewhere in the middle, there might be an exchange that leaves us both better off.

I have always loved the historical economics of it all. The old-fashioned Trading Post was a place where what someone made, grew or knew how to do could be exchanged for something they needed. It was a wholesome recognition that value exists beyond dollars: in time, knowledge, labour, creativity and years spent mastering a craft.

Traditionally, communities relied on that kind of specialization. One person built, another grew, another repaired, another designed, and everyone benefited from people becoming good at different things. It was both economically sensible and beautifully communal.

Around here, our particular expertise happens to be magically turning sugar in to a unique experience. We have spent six years learning the specific logistics of producing a LOT of desserts in buckets, and a lot less time learning flooring, landscaping, painting, carpentry, design, gardening, repairs and the approximately 7,000 other projects involved in owning a home and thinking, we really should do something with that.

Maybe you build, design, paint, garden, landscape, organize, photograph, repair, refinish, or have some other specific trade I have not thought of yet. In between what you do and what we make, there might occasionally be a reciprocal exchange.

We cannot barter our way through everyday life, and the hydro company remains firmly committed to Canadian currency rather than cheesecake, but every once in a while, I think it’s good measure to bring a little of that economy back.

Who’s up for a trade? Leave your trade below or DM us. You bring what you do well, we will bring what we do well, and we will see where the two can meet.

xo

08/15/2026

My physiotherapist told me recently that my body operates at a level of stress most people would consider extreme, except I have spent so much time there that I experience it as normal. There is seemingly a difference between being good at functioning under pressure and pressure actually being good for you.

It turns out, I have always taken in a lot all at once. I notice changes in tone and mood, assess sentences, hear every piece of background noise, notice what is missing, what somebody might need and what needs to happen next. My anxious instinct is to respond to all of it, and I am learning that being aware of something does not automatically make it mine to manage. Business has been a very good exercise in learning that distinction.

I am so excited when people tell me they love our products, or can’t wait to try them! Thousands of people have now had our buckets, which is wild when they are still being made from our home. People tell their friends, come back and trust us enough to try whatever wacky thing I decide should go into a bucket next. My brain goes to how we make more. More cakes, cheesecakes, Cookie Pucks, brownies and toffee. Then it is ovens, labour, time, refrigeration, space, and an impressive amount of our house surrendered to baked goods.

I am incredibly proud of this little bakery and ambitious about where it is going, but part of being an entrepreneur is recognizing when working harder is no longer the answer to growth. I do not want to build a successful business that chains me to an oven, a house, a porch or a phone. I want its success to create more possibilities, not fewer.

I can work hard, care enormously, listen, learn and make good decisions, but I cannot say yes to everything simply because I can find a way to make it work. There is ambition in making things happen, but also maturity in knowing that being capable of more does not always mean more is right. When I started MacKay’s, we used to say, “Sugarcoat everything,” but I understand that differently now. There is more value in honesty, vulnerability and structure… and maybe the only thing that really needs sugarcoating is the cake.

08/12/2026

Our Next Chapter

MacKay’s Bakery has reached a scale none of us could have reasonably imagined, and it has happened much faster than we were prepared for.

Demand has not slowed down. If anything, it continues to climb into numbers that still feel fairly unimaginable for a home-based bakery. It is an extraordinary position to find ourselves in, and one I am deeply grateful for, but it has also required us to learn quickly where our limits are and how to create enough capacity for what comes next.

Through all of it, I could not have felt more surrounded by my village than I have these last few months. Those who could show up, did, and they continue to, even when what we have needed has stretched far beyond any reasonable expectation of generosity or support.

My family and extended family have given us so much of their time, while my friends have come for the early mornings and stayed through the late nights because they believe deeply in me, my family, and what we are building. They have protected my health in every way they can, and I will spend a very long time trying to articulate what that has meant to me.

Now, we are making room for what comes next.

To help us move forward with a significant growth opportunity, some of our resources will be taken offline for a short time. As a result, our open hours and available quantities will temporarily change.

Beginning at the end of this week:

Thursday: 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Friday: 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Saturday: 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.

We will be closed weekly Sunday through Wednesday.

Both little treats and Buckets will be available each day we are open, with quantities fluctuating based on what we are able to produce.

Cash is absolutely not required, and we happily accept e-transfer, but if you have cash, we absolutely prefer it!

There is a lot happening behind the scenes, and we are incredibly fortunate to have reached a point where the question is no longer whether MacKay’s can grow, but how we want it to.

Thank you for continuing to give us the opportunity to figure that out.

07/31/2026

I’ve been thinking a lot about kindling lately.

When I was around twelve years old, having spent every summer in Lion’s Head, my grandfather, the banker, asked me if I wanted to make a little money.

He handed me an axe, and I split kindling. We’d bundle it together, wheel it around the side of the house in a rusted wheelbarrow, and stack it at the end of the driveway, waiting for people to stop. At twelve years old, I thought I was working so I could buy a brown paper bag full of penny candy. Looking back, I realize I was learning something entirely different about life.

Kindling was never the fire. It was simply what started one, and what brought people together for slower, softer evenings.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately because, somewhere along the way, I started believing that growth was always the goal.

A few weeks ago, I found myself smiling because MacKay’s was getting close to 10,000 followers on Instagram. It felt like something worth celebrating. Then it occurred to me that perhaps the greatest gift this bakery has given me isn’t the ability to reach more people. It’s the ability to decide what comes next.

I want dinners at my parents’ house. I want weekends at the trailer. I want to paint my office. I want afternoons at the park with Tessa. I want smaller batches, more time to develop recipes, and more room to create things simply because they are worth creating.

For the longest time, I thought success meant asking, “How do we make more?” Lately, I’ve been asking a different question.

“How do we make sure we preserve the reason we started?”

I feel incredibly fortunate that I even get to ask that question. Building MacKay’s has given me more than I ever imagined. Perhaps the greatest gift of all is the freedom to choose what comes next. To choose the kind of business—and the kind of life—I want to build, thanks to you.

My Gramps taught me a lot of lessons in life. It took me years to realize that working hard was only half the lesson.

06/23/2026

Our Cake Buckets have quietly gotten smaller over the past few months and before anyone asks, no, it’s not shrinkflation because the price shrunk too. We’re calling it shrink-caketion and moving on.

Back when we first went viral in March, our supplier out West, who makes these reusable, eco friendly buckets that took us forever to source years ago, actually hit their production capacity because of us. We put such a huge dent in their inventory that they ran out of our original 34 oz (1 litre) buckets for over a month.

There are many things I anticipated while running a bakery, but buying an entire bucket size out of existence for a month was not one of them.

At the same time, we were listening to what all of you were saying. One of the biggest pieces of feedback we kept hearing was that the original buckets were simply too much for one or two people. People wanted the cake, but they didn’t necessarily want an entire litre of it sitting in their fridge all week.

Many of you have also given me guff over the years for originally saying these buckets served 2 to 4 people. I’ve since updated that to 1 to 4 people because I get it. Some of us really love cake. (Me.)

The smaller 25 oz buckets ended up solving a lot of things at once. The price became more approachable, the portions became more manageable and, perhaps most importantly, the true cake lovers among us can now buy multiple flavours instead of having to choose just one.

If we’ve learned anything over the last few months, it’s that people weren’t necessarily asking for less cake, they were asking for more flavours.

And if you’re still sad about the lack of a litre, don’t worry, we also introduced a 50 oz Caramel Carrot Cake Bucket for our true Carrot Cake squad.

People wanted smaller portions… so we did that, but also here’s an enormous one. 🥕🪣

06/22/2026

My dad has the charisma of an entire city, which is a very difficult thing to explain unless you’ve met him; he is completely unforgettable.

He possesses the quickest wit of anyone I have ever met, a creativity that exists without limitations and an ability to somehow become friends with absolutely everyone he encounters.

He is also, without question, the fiercest protector I know. Growing up, every time I got hurt he would take it harder than I did, and it took me years to realize that it was because he simply could not tolerate seeing the people he loves experience sadness or pain.

He is the person you call at any hour and know with certainty that he will answer. He is the person who will pick you up from the most ridiculous situations, drive you to work in your 30s, renovate your houses and fix almost anything because helping people is simply who he is.

And if you know me, then you know exactly where I got it from. I have often joked that my inability to not work is a personality trait, but the truth is it is hereditary. My entrepreneurial spirit, my absolute obsession with work, my Portuguese fire and my tendency to become completely consumed by an idea all came from him. And when I become passionate about a topic, a thought, an opinion or justice itself and begin talking a mile a minute, I hear him in my own voice because there was probably never any chance this was going to turn out any other way.

And then he became Grandpa, which might somehow be his greatest role yet. Watching him and Tessa together is extraordinary because the moment she sees him, nothing else matters.

So this Father’s Day, we are filling his bucket. Growing up, whenever we visited up north, my grandmother, Ethel (MacKay) Greig, would always make him a banana cream pie from scratch, so this year’s bucket is an ode to him. And as a special note, even though he’s no longer with us, I know his own dad is proud of the life he built and the family he created because we sure are!

MacKay’s Bakery

09/03/2026

08/26/2026

08/26/2026

08/26/2026

08/23/2026

08/15/2026

08/12/2026

07/31/2026

06/23/2026

06/22/2026

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