Two KC bakeries scare up Halloween treats that are sweet and spooky

John Charles Gregg hovers over a waxed paper-lined tray in his tiny Kansas City North kitchen. Gregg — known as J.C. to friends, family and co-workers at the Overland Park Costco — is eyeball-to-eyeball with the fake peepers he crafts every October from maraschino cherries covered in plump gobs of dry fondant.

Today Gregg painstakingly paints grotesquely enlarged red veins on each cherry with a fine-tipped brush, a road map of jagged lines spidering out from cartoonish green and turquoise pupils. Maraschino cherry stems add to the morbidly delightful effect.

Tools of the home baker’s passion litter the kitchen’s granite countertops: A tin of Valrhona cocoa sits in a pool of brown dust; a well-worn stand mixer is surrounded by cracked eggshells, a bottle of pure vanilla and empty butter wrappers; a spatula with residue from a flourless chocolate cake is propped against a bowl. A hastily scratched-out to-do list rests next to a piping bag: cherry eyeballs, bird beaks, spider web cupcake toppers, Pennywise-sculpted cake.

“Pennywise is a terrifying clown, the antagonist in Stephen King’s novel ‘It,’” says Gregg, a devoted King fan.

Welcome to Halloween, a la Gregg, the holiday where he artfully combines a love for all things gruesome with his penchant for sweet treats. Gregg’s affection for the holiday started during his childhood in Louisburg, Kan.: he loved to be scared and to scare the wits out of his siblings.

With three older brothers, including his twin, and two sisters, Gregg quickly learned the thrill of hiding around corners of the barn on his family’s farm, jumping out and screaming at the top of his lungs.

“My parents, sisters, brothers, it didn’t really matter my target,” Gregg says, stepping back from the tray of eyeballs, surveying his work. “Just to see someone jump out of their skin was the objective.”

A voracious reader, Gregg recalls being around 10 years old when he picked up a book his mother had just finished. “It was ‘The Shining’ by Stephen King,” Gregg says with a chuckle. “I started reading and couldn’t put it down. That was the beginning of my fascination with the macabre.”

Gregg’s imagination conjured vivid visuals of scenes from the book. And he was especially taken by the big-screen portrayal of his favorite sequence from the book: The twin girls dressed in frilly blue dresses tied with pink sashes, ominously standing at the end of the hallway in the spooky abandoned hotel. “I am captivated by twins, since I’m a twin myself and my grandfather, Donald, and father are twins, too,” he says.

In a quest to satisfy his curiosity about Halloween traditions, a 12-year-old Gregg asked the Louisburg Library librarian, Mrs. German, for research assistance. While combing through books, Gregg stumbled on Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, celebrated on Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 and 2. The Mexican holiday focuses on gatherings of family and friends who pray for loved ones who have died.

“I was expecting weird,” Gregg says. “Much to my surprise, it was full of color and beauty.” Drawn to the painted skulls and skeletons typical of Day of the Dead décor, Gregg started sketching, mimicking the pictures he found in books. “Somewhere along the way, I incorporated Day of the Dead into my baking.”

Gregg’s mother, Shirley, was a baker who turned out pies, cakes and cookies for her family of six and a husband, Jerry Lee, who liked three squares a day and lots of dessert. “She let me help her when I was little, cracking eggs, stirring batters, watching things puff up and brown in the oven,” Gregg says. “Rudimentary stuff — but I was hooked on baking.”

Gregg recalls one recipe for a pudding-like chocolate cake. “It was fudgy and magical — you poured boiling water and vinegar over the dry ingredients,” he said. “Since we lived on a farm and had cows and plenty of fresh milk, I cranked homemade ice cream to top the cake.”

Gregg, a 4-H member, went on to enter decorated cakes (“I won a blue ribbon for a Garfield the Cat cake at age 14”) and enrolled in home economics classes in high school to not only hone his skills but also to learn the chemistry behind baking.

Now in his late 40s, Gregg is constantly turning out tortes, cakes, cookies and cupcakes for friends and family, including his 93-year-old grandfather, who lives across the street from Gregg.

“You don’t have to be celebrating anything to get a J.C. original,” he says. “ I live to make people happy through food. The kitchen is my laboratory.”

And, just for the record, not everything Gregg bakes is gothic or twisted. Take, for instance, his current obsession, a flourless chocolate cake with a chocolate cremeux and Nutella ice cream.

He also bestows flavored cupcakes on friends. “Cupcakes such as Orange Dreamsicle and chocolate raspberry truffle with towering buttercream go with me to graduation parties, and I am just getting into pies, after receiving a cookbook from a friend this summer,” he says.

But today Gregg is preparing items from his flour-splattered checklist for a Nov. 2 Day of the Dead party to honor the memory of his mother. Stars of the sweet and savory buffet will be fashioned to provoke shudders and intrigue from guests, including a cream cheese skull and ribs layered from prosciutto, the painted chocolate cherry eyeballs and lifelike bird beaks fashioned from fondant.

After his Day of the Dead soiree, Gregg’s newly licensed cottage bakery will go full-tilt into production for Thanksgiving and Christmas. “My business is called Covet Bakery,” he says. Pausing to add the finishing flourish on a particularly bloodshot chocolate eyeball, Gregg adds, “A devilishly good bakery.”

Sweet childhood memories

Angie Fry and Kelly Conwell, both of Kansas City, are engaged in a good-natured competitive piping war. Spread out in front of the SmallBatch KC business partners are a dozen of their secret-recipe sugar cookies, cut out in pumpkin shapes.

Plastic bags filled with bright Halloween-orange and green frosting are the women’s weapons. Clearly Fry is winning Round 1. “This just isn’t my forte,” admits Conwell, head pastry chef at the newly opened Jax Fish House and Oyster Bar on the Country Club Plaza. “But practice makes perfect.”

Fry decorates her last cookie with a swirl of kelly green frosting, fashioning a curly-cue handle on a sugar-glittered pumpkin.“You’re getting better,” Fry says, nudging Conwell with her elbow and pointing at a cookie with her pastry bag. “The ‘Happy Halloween’ you’ve written looks kind of spooky.”

Fry, a public defender for the State of Missouri and self-described “grandma-trained” home cook, and Conwell joined forces recently to launch SmallBatch KC, a boutique custom sweets and catering company specializing in from-scratch specialty baked goods.

The duo is strategizing their festive Halloween menu, highlighting fall’s signature flavors with ghoulishly good showstoppers: pumpkin pots de crème, s’mores cupcakes, challah doughnuts and a salted caramel apple and pear cobbler adorned with a sweet biscuit topping.

“Kelly and I met at last year’s James Beard dinner at the American restaurant,” Fry says. “She was there, helping pastry chef Nick Wesemann and said hi to Aaron, my husband, who she knew from working at Bluestem.”

There was an instant connection between Fry and Conwell — “We were more like sisters, really, and with our combined drives and abilities, I knew we’d end up doing something special that was food-related together,” Fry says.

Fry and Conwell attended an after-hours party at a Crossroads Arts District bar following the dinner’s conclusion, and an organic bond formed. “We had one long, nonstop conversation that night where we shared our respective food journeys,” Conwell says. “While they were very different, there were striking similarities.”

Doris Jean, Fry’s paternal grandmother, heavily influenced her love for cooking. In a kitchen always infused with tempting smells and stocked with her granddaughter’s favorite foods — apple pie, cinnamon bread, oatmeal-raisin cookies — Doris Jean imparted priceless knowledge and techniques that Fry tucked away for future reference.

“Her food wasn’t fussy or particularly elevated; she was just a great country cook,” Fry says. “Everything was special because she made it with me in mind.”

Fry also learned an important life lesson from Doris Jean. “Preparing and eating food is the equivalent of love,” she says. “It’s the purest way to show appreciation and fondness.”

Conwell was born in Topeka and grew up in Concordia, a small town in the state’s Smoky Hills north-central region, and baked and cooked alongside her mother, Debra, and siblings Matt and Kaylee. “I was in fifth grade when I made my first lasagna, a very traditional recipe,” Conwell says. “My mom coached me on the speaker phone while she was at work. I still make that dish to this day.”

Conwell whipped up cream puffs and pastry cream from Betty Crocker’s classic cookbook, worked as a buser and server at the local country club and eventually was recruited to make the famous cinnamon-and-cheese rolls that club members wolfed down. Conwell went on to enroll in Johnson County Community College’s chef apprentice program, where she was mentored by chef Felix Sturmer and successfully competed internationally with the acclaimed culinary program.

In 2009, Conwell was crowned best student chef in the country by the American Culinary Federation and was on the fast track to a career in the culinary world. After a year in Germany, she moved back to Kansas City, where she worked at Chaz on the Plaza in the Raphael Hotel and at Bluestem.

Today Fry and Conwell are excited about SmallBatch KC’s first Halloween of delivering boxes of cookies and pies to customers. “Always in the forefront of my mind when baking is what I call ‘grandma plus one,’” Fry says. “Apply the quality she taught me and kick it up a notch or two. And, of course, Kelly has the technical knowledge and crazy-good talent.”

Halloween was a cherished holiday for both. Fry’s mother, Barbara, made sugar cookies, and Doris Jean made doughnuts; her dad, Joe, piled Fry and her brother, Joey, in a Radio Flyer wagon to make the neighborhood trick-or-treating rounds. “Afterward we would come home, dump our candy on the floor and sit cross-legged, binge-eating what we collected,” Fry says. “And Doris Jean always made our costumes.”

Conwell’s Halloween experiences included homemade popcorn balls (“the real deal, all gooey”), marching in small-town Halloween parades and trick-or-treating in downtown Concordia. Now an aunt, she makes arts and crafts and cookies with nieces and nephews and sits in front of roaring bonfires with s’mores ingredients at hand — a sweet indulgence Conwell considers the perfect chocolate fall dessert.

“Can never get enough of a s’more,” Conwell says. “I think my love for Halloween is getting stronger the older I get. And this year I have an infant nephew who we’re dressing up as Mickey Mouse. You’re never too young to get into the spirit.”

This story was originally published October 28, 2014 at 7:00 AM.