by Ebony L. Morman

Sundays are indeed fun days for Honeybear Bake Shop’s cookie monsters, or fans. That’s when Hannah Neville’s weekly menu goes live. For four years, the pastry chef has been curating vibrant cookie boxes through an online cookie boutique and pop-up shop that include imaginative cookie creations — something Neville believed Charlotte was missing when the bake shop launched. 

“I wanted to open something cool,” she says. “I wanted to stand out and be unique, because there are so many good bakeries in Charlotte, like The Batch House, Suarez Bakery, and Wentworth & Fenn. They do a broad spectrum of cookies, cakes, muffins, danishes, pastries, and brownies. And I wanted to focus on one thing and just do it really well.” 

She started the business using a payout she received from The Ritz-Carlton at the start of the pandemic when employees were given an option to leave voluntarily. She was the hotel’s pastry chef for about two years. Previously, she worked as a pastry chef for both Church and Union, then 5Church, and Big View Diner. 

Honeybear got its start in Neville’s home, but the shop quickly outgrew the space. Just last summer, Honeybear made the switch to a lesser known commercial kitchen in Clanton Park, a space she shares with two other Charlotte artisans. It’s a better fit, she says. Now, she has greater capacity to grow the business. 

Neville’s approach is simple: take elements and techniques from her experience as a pastry chef and infuse them into cookies. Evidence of this is seen in the majority of her cookies, specifically in those that are topped with whipped ganache. It’s fluffier and creamier than regular ganache and it thickens as it cools. 

“While working at The Ritz-Carlton, I learned they finished all their cupcakes with whipped ganaches,” she says. “So I took that element and then put it into a cookie.” 

Neville’s cookie process includes ensuring that certain flavor profiles are consistently present: creamy, crunchy, salty, and sweet. Her desire for these four to be at the forefront helps with ingenuity, allowing her to imagine flavors, textures, and techniques that could sometimes be considered unorthodox. She’s not shy about pushing the bounds of her creativity; creating something as simple as a cookie with chocolate chips in it is not her goal. 

“I like nostalgic flavors,” she says. “We make an apple pie cookie and we make pie crust, roll it out into a little disk, bake it, put it underneath the cookie dough, and then fill it with pie filling. So it’s like a cookie, but you open it up and it has a pie crust underneath, a crumble on top, and a filling in it.” 

Incorporating familiar flavors and themes is paramount to Neville’s creative process because after years in the business, she knows what her customers desire. 

“They like nostalgia, they like fun,” she says. “They like remembering the snack cakes. And I think that’s what’s really helped build my brand: taking flavors, themes, and stuff that people know and they can relate to and then turning it into a cookie really helps draw people to my business.”

That’s how ideas for Hostess, watermelon Sour Patch, Smarties, and chicken and waffle cookies came into existence. While the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park graduate comes up with some of these ideas during her daily commute, she admits that her brain rarely shuts off, a trait that has been present since the days of rushing home from elementary school to watch baking shows on Food Network. She credits the channel for inspiring her love of baking. Then, for years, she witnessed her mom and dad baking late into the night to fill orders for her mom’s online cooking business. 

Between filling orders for weekly menus, the Honeybear team keeps busy popping up around town at events and farmer’s markets, spending each Saturday morning at the market in Matthews. This week, it’s all about ice cream boxes, which are particularly popular. For the second consecutive year, Neville’s developed cookie recipes inspired by Two Scoops Creamery’s popular ice cream flavors. This year’s creations include twisted raspberry (vanilla, raspberry and chocolate pretzels), cookies by the sea (​​vanilla cookie base with Oreo pieces, homemade soft salted caramel and an Oreo and caramel whipped ganache) and four other flavors. In the past, she curated themed boxes inspired by menu items from Jeni’s Ice Creams and Ben & Jerry’s. 

Thanks to nearly a dozen wholesale accounts, Honeybear’s cookies and pastries can also be experienced throughout Charlotte at Enderly Coffee, The Wandering Cup, and Cafe Moka, to name a few. Partnerships like these provide Neville with an opportunity to extend her imagination beyond cookies. Still, she takes the same approach: how much can be crammed into a muffin, a croissant, or any other pastry and still have it taste good and be cool?    

“I like owning a small business,” she says. “It’s definitely hard, but I think being creative, and being able to execute the creativity is rewarding. It’s cool to have all these memories and pictures of what I was able to do like, I turned that into a cookie, and it was, actually, good.”