In this Issue of Hey Cherokee County…

✅ She Turned a Baking Mistake Into a Best Seller. Now She's Betting on Andrews.

✅ Andrews asks residents to help shape the future look of downtown

Cherokee County Events

October 3rd & 4th

October 12th

October 24th

October 31st

October 31st

November 9th

November 21st

The brownies came out too thin.

That's a problem when you're running a bakery and you've got a tray of brownies that can't be sold as brownies. You could trash them. Write it off as a learning day. Start over.

Dolores King, owner of Homespun Delights and Deli, did none of that.

She and her daughter put buttercream between two of the flat ones, stacked them together, and put them out to see what would happen.

"Those sold like crazy," King said. "We still make the brownie sandwiches. I mean, it was a mistake because we were actually making brownies. But it worked."

That moment — the failed batch that became a signature item — is a pretty good shorthand for how King thinks about business. She doesn't discard what goes sideways. She looks at it, turns it over, and figures out what it could become. It's a habit she's been refining for nearly four decades.

King has been building things since 1986.

That year, she opened Spring Rain Custom Framing in Sylva. She'd been studying interior design at Western Carolina University — until the semester before graduation, when she switched her major to nutrition and dietetics, a decision that nearly gave her parents heart failure.

"I had my class ring. I had my graduation regalia ordered. Everything," she laughed. "They were not happy." 

She eventually graduated with a degree in education, went back to school later for a paramedic license she never used professionally, and somewhere in the middle of all of it, she started making birthday cakes.

She had taken her first Wilton cake decorating class at age 15 and never really stopped baking. 

In 2004, she opened a bakery called Morning Delights in White's Plaza in Andrews and ran it for about three years. When it closed, she went back to teaching pre-K. Her mother had taken over the custom framing business and eventually relocated the shop to Andrews. Her niece owns it now.

"Maybe we just don't like to work for other people," she said.

It's a joke, but only barely. Her son-in-law has run a microgreens business and is branching into other ventures. Her brother-in-law owns a business. Entrepreneurship, in King’s family, seems to be less a career choice than a personality trait — something passed down not through direct instruction but through example, through watching the people around you build things and deciding that's what you do.

Her daughter was the one who finally pushed her back toward a brick-and-mortar bakery about five years ago. King went along with the idea, but not without reservations.

"I was a little skeptical whether or not the town could support just a bakery," she said.

She hedged her bet. When Homespun Hobbies opened on Locust Street in 2021, it launched as a bakery and mercantile — a place where local crafters and artists could bring their goods, giving the business a second revenue stream in case the baked goods alone weren't enough to carry things.

It turned out she had it backwards.

"The bakery basically carried everything, which we weren't sure that was going to happen," she said. "The bakery took off more — advanced more — than the mercantile actually did."

The first year was a learning curve. By the second year, business was picking up. Five years in, people were still walking through the door and saying they hadn't known Andrews had a bakery.

What Homespun has always offered goes well beyond a standard dessert case. Specialty orders at the shop have included cakes with elaborate fondant toppers molded over several days, a green tea matcha wedding cake, and an authentic Black Forest cake — the real version, with the specific type of alcohol the recipe requires, which they eventually tracked down in Gainesville after finding it wasn't available locally. When a customer wanted a cannoli cake and King wasn't sure her cannoli were up to par, she made it anyway. The customer loved it.

"If you can get us a recipe, we can make it," King said, with her assistant Helen Sorrell adding, "Or a picture. You give us an idea, and we'll bake it."

That willingness to attempt anything hasn't made King cavalier about the craft. If there's one thing she wants people to understand about professional baking, it's that instinct will only take you so far.

"You can cook from the heart, but you can't bake from the heart," she said. "Baking is a science. You have to have the right ratio of ingredients to make it work."

Every custom cake at Homespun is baked from scratch to order. The ingredients come from a specialty bakery supplier — a company that services bakers specifically, not restaurants or food service at large. It costs more. The product is better.

"I can pronounce all the ingredients that we put in our cake," she said.

King's read on Andrews five years ago was cautious. The town she sees today is different.

That shift isn't just a feeling. Cherokee County added a net of 2,190 residents between 2020 and 2024, according to the North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management, driven almost entirely by people moving in. In 2025, Cherokee County recorded the largest percentage increase in visitor spending among all 100 North Carolina counties, with visitor dollars reaching $116.67 million, a 13.9 percent increase over the year before.

The data is pointing in one direction. King doesn't need a spreadsheet to see it.

"Andrews is growing,” she said. “We're getting more things in, we're getting more people in, and there's just a more positive feel to Andrews now, even than it was five years ago." 

That confidence is what put her on Main Street.

She was walking by a building when she noticed it was available for rent. She made a call just to see. From there, she said, things fell into place — a bigger kitchen, more seating than the four tables Homespun had on Locust Street, and a location that puts her squarely in the middle of the foot traffic that already moves through downtown Andrews.

The move also came with higher rent. She thought hard about whether the business could handle it. She decided it could.

"We took the leap," she said.

Homespun Delights and Deli opened its doors at the new Main Street location last week. The new building has allowed the business to expand beyond baked goods into soups and sandwiches — "the savory and the sweet," as King puts it. 

The bread for the sandwiches — white, sourdough, croissants — is baked in-house. The soups rotate weekly, and most of the recipes come from local families, not from famous cookbooks or the internet. Potato soup from Helen’s family. Broccoli cheddar from Delores’ family. Vegetable beef and chicken and dumplings passed down through generations. Taco soup from a woman at their church. 

It's comfort food rooted in real places and real people — the kind of thing you can't manufacture.

Ask King what she wants Main Street Andrews to look like in five years, and she doesn't talk about market share or competitive advantage. She doesn't talk about wanting fewer restaurants downtown so Homespun can be the destination.

"I hope every building in town has something in it," she said. "Even if it's five more restaurants, I don't care, as long as all of the buildings in town are full. I think that's going to help more than anything. Having everything filled up."

It's a vision that lines up almost exactly with what community and civic leaders have been working toward. The Town of Andrews has partnered with the North Carolina Department of Commerce's Office of Rural Planning to develop a formal five-year economic development plan — and when the steering committee conducted its community SWOT analysis, empty buildings showed up as both a key weakness and a key opportunity. 

King, who has been watching downtown Andrews from a bakery counter for five years, already knew that. When asked what it would take to get those buildings filled, she credited her own landlord as a model — someone who made it possible for a small business owner to take a chance on a new location. Getting others to follow that example, she said, is part of what needs to happen next.

"More people that are willing to take a chance on Andrews itself," she said. "The building owners…take a more active role in trying to get them rented out versus just letting them sit empty."

Benches or parking spaces? More trees or better lighting? Public art, outdoor dining or easier street crossings?

Those are some of the choices the Town of Andrews is putting before the public as it looks at potential improvements to the downtown streetscape.

The town has launched an Andrews Streetscape Improvement Survey asking residents and visitors what they value about downtown, what needs improvement and what they would like to see added. The survey closes Oct. 7.

The effort comes as Andrews works through its five-year Strategic Economic Development Plan and prepares for N.C. Department of Transportation plans to repave Main Street.

The Appalachian Design Center, a program of MountainTrue, is assisting the town with the project by providing volunteer engineering and design services at no cost. Public feedback from the survey will be used to help develop streetscape concepts, which will later be presented for additional community input.

The project focuses on the public spaces and features people encounter along downtown streets including sidewalks, crosswalks, lighting, landscaping, trees, planters, benches, signs and gateway entrances. It does not involve redesigning the roadway itself.

Among other questions, the survey asks people how comfortable they feel walking and crossing streets downtown, whether there are specific locations that feel unsafe or difficult, and how easy it is to find parking.

It also asks respondents whether they would support removing some on-street parking spaces to create room for features such as benches, plantings or seating.

Participants can select their top three priorities from a list that includes benches and seating, flowers and shade trees, better lighting, trash and recycling bins, bike racks, public art and murals, wayfinding signs, outdoor dining areas, and shade structures or awnings.

The survey also gives people a chance to identify what they believe is already working downtown and what they don't want to lose as improvements are considered.

The Andrews Streetscape Improvement Survey is open through Oct. 7.

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