Early this year, Laura Stafford got a phone call that set off the strangest award ceremony of her career. A man in Pensacola had eaten one of her homemade Crawfish King Cakes the year before and wanted to swing by Daphne to pick up another on his way to a party in New Orleans. She said yes — she has trouble saying no — and mentioned it to no one.
What she didn’t know: he entered her cake in a three-day King Cake contest covering Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. He had, it turns out, been a judge in previous King Cake competitions and thought her crawfish creation had a real shot.
By Friday evening a local television station was reporting that an entry from Daphne had made the Top 10. Wire services picked the story up nationally. By Sunday, the man was calling Laura to ask her not to post anything until the full story ran. “What full story?” she asked.
The answer: her Crawfish King Cake had been named Top New Contender, Number 1 in Alabama, and Top Three Overall — and its baker learned about it the same way everyone else did.
Lines around the building
The aftermath reshaped the business. Demand exploded, with lines of people wrapped around the building to buy a King Cake. “It was crazy!” she says. What had been a seasonal Mardi Gras confection became a year-round seller. Gourmet Goodies now bakes both savory King Cakes — the famous Crawfish among them — and sweet traditional ones in five flavors: Alabama Sweet Hot, Traditional Cream Cheese, Banana, Apple and Caramel. There are also King Cake Bombs, boxes of minis that have become a phenomenon of their own — 200 went out for a single wedding recently, alongside a birthday King Cake requested by a young boy.
“We have baked King Cakes or minis every week since then,” Stafford says. Each January she returns to the King Cake-Off in Mobile benefiting the Ronald McDonald House — a contest she has won before — where she has revealed new flavors.
The crawfish cake itself is a Louisiana story: Stafford lived in Denham Springs, outside Baton Rouge, where “crawfish are everything,” and wanted to build a savory king cake around them.
Minister first, baker second
Ask how Gourmet Goodies began and the answer starts somewhere unexpected. “You know, this is not all I do,” she says. “I am an ordained minister. I can get you married and cater your reception at the same time. But I don’t do flowers.”
Stafford was born in Oxford, Mississippi, and moved to Daphne in the ninth grade. Her father attended law school at Ole Miss but walked away after his final class — titled, memorably, How to Make a Living Suing People — and built a career with venture capitalists instead. He is also a pastor at Coastal Church, where nearly the whole Stafford family serves; her brother Chad Stafford founded the church, and Laura is the Children’s Pastor at its Bay Minette campus.
She earned her theology degree in 2000 from Central Bible College, now Evangel University, in Springfield, Missouri, and her first pastorate was in Daphne — where the baking began. As a children’s minister trying to fund youth-group trips, she started baking for fundraisers. “I never want anyone to not be able to afford to go on a youth group trip, so I figured out a way to raise the funds through bake sales and such,” she says. “I have a saying: if money is a problem, there is no problem. We can raise it.” One church bake sale sold $19,000 of her gourmet apples to pay for a Disney World trip, and a profitable cake auction followed. Then people started calling to buy the apples and cakes outright. She baked on the side for about a year, added holiday meals — and Gourmet Goodies was born.
From a church kitchen to Highway 98
Ministry moves took her to Orange Beach, then Decatur. When her brother and sister-in-law founded Coastal Church in Daphne, Chad asked Laura to cater the church’s seventh-anniversary celebration for 700 people — cooked in Decatur, trucked down, and plated in the Daphne Civic Center’s kitchen. Six months later she was back home as the church’s Hospitality Minister, cooking free breakfasts, Wednesday-night dinners and small-group events.
When Coastal launched a building campaign, Laura pledged earnings from Gourmet Goodies — and the two operations grew together, as customers picking up church meals started asking about the food. She managed and rented the church cafe’s kitchen until demand outgrew it, then moved the business two years ago to its current location off Highway 98 in Daphne, expanding take-out meals, catering and weddings. “We doubled the business when we moved here. We’ve almost outgrown this space too.” She employs 13 people, including Merideth Latham — once a member of her Decatur youth group, now Coastal’s Bay Minette campus coordinator and a Gourmet Goodies fixture since the beginning.
“Gourmet Goodies is a family. We love each other and work hard and play hard as well. Our customers are a part of our family,” she says. Her guiding rule is one she heard from her parents all her life: “When you do right, right will follow you.”
What’s next: a children’s home
Stafford’s ambitions run past party trays. The mother of an adopted child, she wants to buy property and build a children’s home. “There are 160 kids on a waiting list for placement homes right now in Baldwin County,” she says. “I want to change that statistic, and I believe that Gourmet Goodies will help fund that dream.”
In the meantime, the store keeps expanding — partyware and home decor alongside pastries, jellies and homemade bread; charcuterie boards, wreaths, gift baskets and candles for the holidays; full Thanksgiving menus with Tuesday pickup slots; and corporate holiday orders by the dozens. “Time is the sacred cow in America these days,” she says. “The more time I can save people and the fewer stops they have to make is more time saved for my customers. We can do it all, and make a friend for life doing it.”
She still cooks Thanksgiving meals for families whose children are in cancer treatment, then spends Black Friday on a ten-hour shopping run with her sister and girlfriends. And every week, there are King Cakes — born of a contest she never knew she entered, and a rule she lives by: love God, love people, and everything works out in the end.