Six months after opening her coffee shop The Sweet Spot at 102 N. Main St. in Boulder, Kayla Holman is “really happy to still be here.”
“I’ve had a ton of community support,” she said after the Jan. 28 milestone. “You can’t make it without the community.”
That support helped make it possible for Holman to hire her first employee — Korene Edwards — in early January.
Born in Helena and raised in Boulder, Holman is a graduate of the Arizona Culinary Institute in Scottsdale. Yet she said it was the time she and her sisters spent baking with their grandmother Mary Giulio that taught Holman how to prepare the cinnamon rolls, caramel rolls, cookies and other baked goods she offers alongside espresso drinks.
“I learned it all from Grandma Giulio,” Holman said. “She was always baking.”
Grandma Giulio was known for her miniature cinnamon rolls, which Holman said she’d bake by the dozen to sell or give away. Aside from replacing all-purpose flour with bread flour, she follows her grandmother’s recipe.
Such as it is.
“She said put water in bowl, [then] yeast, sugar, let it work, till it feels right,” Holman said. “You didn’t measure or anything — [just] till it feels right.”
The cinnamon rolls, frosted or not and considerably larger than her grandmother’s, often sell out.
“Kayla takes after grandmother in the goodies department,” Ellen Harne said one recent morning after stopping in on the way to work.
In addition to her cinnamon rolls, Holman has become known for the inspirational, aspirational or philosophical quotes she writes on the small white bags she puts cookies or pizzelles in.
“I know how the first things that you hear [or] read at the start of the day impact how the rest of your day is going to go,” she said. “I figured if I could give a cookie in a bag with a positive quote with each drink it would start each customer’s day off in a positive way.”
Describing her “happy place” as “drinking coffee and baking things,” Holman said “it’s always been kind of a dream” to open a coffee shop and bakery and she spent three years planning before opening The Sweet Spot.
“I didn’t want to just jump in without knowing exactly what I wanted to do,” she said.
She eventually set up shop at Main Street and Centennial Avenue in a building that once housed an automotive garage and showroom.
Most of the work to make the space usable was cosmetic, Holman said. She ripped off sheetrock and painted over the “hot pink and teal” paint with a shade called “Espresso Martini.”
She also installed a curved bench, reupholstered to match the color scheme, that, like the cinnamon rolls, came from her grandmother’s home.
