How Miss Peabody’s Southern Tea Cakes Pays Tribute To the Past

Even though she was raised in Denver, Pamela Richard grew up eating Southern tea cakes. Her Louisiana-born grandmother would make the soft, chewy, cookielike treats for all the grandkids. “It’s amazing how food is a connection to the past,” Richard says. After earning an MBA and working in the nonprofit sector, she was let go from her job in 2017; it was then that those memories inspired Richard to change her life’s course and begin baking tea cakes under her own brand, Miss Peabody’s Southern Tea Cakes. She is Miss Peabody, after all: the smiling girl in pigtails and glasses on her labels with a nickname her grandmother gave her, thanks to Richard’s eyewear (a reference to the spectacled 1950s cartoon dog, Mr. Peabody). These days, Richard is baking far more than her grandmother’s traditional, vanilla-scented tea cakes. In addition to four more flavors, including candied yam and bananas Foster, she’s created large and mini iterations of chess, sweet potato, and sweet potato pecan pies and peach cobblers with Palisade fruit come summertime—all of which you can buy online for delivery or pickup in Aurora. Order by the piece or the dozen, or try Miss Peabody’s Sweet Box, a $35 monthly treasure trove of six desserts. Five are made by Richard, and one comes from a roster of local female bakers. “I believe in abundance,” she says. “There’s plenty of business, if we work together.” Grandma would surely approve.