I am writing this piece after staying up late, mourning a Minnesotan I never met, watching for arsonists, and sleeping fitfully, having failed for a week to write about cinnamon rolls. But these are really good cinnamon rolls, by the African American pastry chef Shawn McKenzie, who runs Penny’s, the mini-chain of coffee shops and cafés. They’re worthy of national food-world attention.
In my defense, it’s really hard to write about cinnamon rolls when the police you pay have murdered a Black man, again, brutally and with glib indifference, and protesters are rebelling against this grueling and cruel constant injustice, because any kind of allegiance to the dream and promise of America demands it.
And then your post office and bank burn down and weird strangers in pickup trucks with their license plates taken off roar past your door. And your terror for your neighbors and your city and your kids pours into the crucible of grief and misery for a man, George Floyd, murdered in our city and in our name, in a recurring sin that we never fix, or even, decade after decade, alter.
And yet, amid even our greatest grief, we must again, eventually, eat. Without eating there is no tomorrow, no healing, and no hope. And one thing we can eat to feel better is Shawn McKenzie’s spectacular cinnamon rolls.
Picture a tender pastry, whorled like a snail’s shell in a little parchment cup, the bottom third sticky and sweet with one of those concoctions great pastry chefs excel at—the kind you can gobble without bothering to notice and marvel. Let’s take the time to marvel. McKenzie makes her cinnamon rolls by mixing brown sugar, oranges, vanilla beans, cinnamon, ground coriander, Mount Gay dark rum, and currants and golden raisins. She cooks all this until the rum boils off and the dried fruits bloom with flavor. She removes the inedible bits, rolls the dough, bakes it, frosts the result with a rum-raisin icing, and crowns it with a pretty maple pecan.
Peel off the paper and the top bites taste like standard cinnamon roll, albeit with a bit of orange. The sticky lower third, though, is like a song about the Caribbean, about spice routes, about French colonies, about modern farm butter. It’s a cinnamon roll that tells a story no cinnamon roll has before told. This is hard to do.
I mean, people, we’ve been eating cinnamon rolls on this planet since something like 2,000 BCE, when Arab traders started funding overland transport of the tree bark native to southern India, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka. We’ve been eating cinnamon rolls since Spain decided it was sick of Venice and Genoa’s monopoly on the seaborne cinnamon and spice trade and sent Christopher Columbus blundering west. We’ve been eating cinnamon rolls for such a long time that it’s really hard to do something new in cinnamon rolls. Try one of these cinnamon rolls.
You can get them curbside to go from Penny’s, in Linden Hills. Penny’s opened in downtown Minneapolis in 2016 as a better coffee shop and subsequently has grown into a high-style mini-chain catering to the creative-meetings-and-avocado-toast crowd. To get your own cinnamon rolls, hop on Penny’s website and fill an electronic cart. I recommend you order a four-pack of cinnamon rolls. And then load up your basket with a few other things, especially the croissants, definitely some dark chocolate chunk zephyr cookies, maybe a loaf of porridge bread, and all the garnishes to make avocado toast for four. That will give you a good sense of Shawn McKenzie’s great gifts.
The croissants reveal an unusual exterior: They seem so crisp at first that you think they might be tough. Then you discover an interior both dewy and airy. The zephyr cookies deserve cult superstardom. Built with brown butter, rye flour, loads of Mexican vanilla, and caramel-chocolate chunks, they’re as thickly chocolaty as chocolate midnight at the bottom of a chocolate well.
McKenzie’s last gig before Penny’s involved running the pastry program for three Isaac Becker restaurants (112 Eatery, Burch, and Bar La Grassa).
“I like simple things, and I really love pastries,” Becker told me when I called him a few weeks ago. “And to make something simple great you need skills—and I love her skills as a baker. Things people don’t get excited about, her skills make them good. Up until I had Shawn’s scones, I thought scones had to be dry and bland.”
McKenzie ended up running Becker’s various pastry programs because she was working in Portland, Oregon, where she met his then second-in-command, Daniel del Prado. Del Prado, who now owns and runs the restaurants Martina and Colita, told me he fell in love with McKenzie’s work and personality at the same time.
“She’s very humble, a very hard worker,” del Prado told me. “But at the same time her flavors and techniques are not shy. Her croissant—it’s not like anyone else’s, and she’s a machine and she’s never crabby. She’s the perfect pastry chef for sure.”
•••••
Perfect, of course, is a hard road to walk. Born to African American parents, McKenzie was adopted by an African American dad and a white mom in the hippie/grunge-rock capital of America: Olympia, Washington. McKenzie remembers growing up free and riding her bike outside beneath the pines all day.
“If it was summer it was, Get out of the house; we don’t want to see you till dark. We were kind of an artistic family,” McKenzie said. Her mother is an English professor, and McKenzie recalls a fondness for the greenness, the hippies, and the music. But Olympia was “also kind of a boring town. There was only so much you could do, so I spent a lot of time with my dad cooking and baking, making chocolate chip cookies and spaghetti from scratch.”
McKenzie’s dad worked as the head chef at a senior-living facility. And McKenzie supposes her focus on brown sugar and brown sugar flavors began when she worked at his side in the senior center and discovered what could be done with the brown sugar that was always out next to the coffee for aging hippies avoiding white sugar. If you look for it, you can see McKenzie’s hippie roots in plenty of her other work: porridge bread made with coconut flakes, wheat bran, and millet; tahini in the chocolate chip cookies; hemp hearts in the smoothies.
You can also sense the influence of McKenzie’s father, who hailed from Savannah, Georgia, and rarely talked about his childhood—McKenzie intuits that it was awful. She leans heavily into those dark Southern sugars with their difficult and painful history in the plantation economy. Molasses and the darkest brown sugars—the cheap sweeteners left over from the refining process—were the most readily available to enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Jim Crow South. McKenzie uses brown sugar in her croissants, which is radical in the world of fine French pastry.
“Molasses (’lasses) cake is a plantation relic, mentioned often in the slave narratives,” writes Toni Tipton-Martin in Jubilee, her landmark 2019 book about 200 years of African American foodways on this continent. Emphasizing those dark flavors, though, that’s McKenzie’s modern addition, and that subtle richness haunts all her most accomplished work.
“When you look at the lineage of what I’m doing, it’s all out there,” McKenzie says about her croissant and her cinnamon roll. That is, she suggests, they’re expressions of exquisite French technique that evoke the complex sorrow and joy of African American foodways—its gifts and its traps.
“There’s a stigma people have towards me,” McKenzie says. “My dad was Black, my mom was white, my birth parents were both Black. But as people say, I’m on the lighter side of skin color. The way I speak, I’m from the Pacific Northwest. So people will say, Oh, she’s not Black. I hate hearing that. That’s really disrespectful. It’s tough to have to prove yourself to people all the time. I don’t want to feel like I need to defend who I am. I want to say ‘I’m just Shawn from the old Evergreen State.’
“And to be honest, a lot of the time all I’m thinking about is the smell of brown butter coming off the croissants. I’m not back here thinking, Hopefully I’m representing my people the right way. You find yourself trying to be perfect, and that’s a hard road to walk. I want to think: If you do right by your people and do right by yourself, hopefully everything will be okay.”
And so McKenzie finds herself in the same storm-tossed boat as all of us. She wants to be seen and understood, and she has put her gifts literally out on the table for all of us. But to really understand what she is giving us requires the whole city to allow uncomfortable truths, like the history and meaning of brown sugar and molasses, and why we’ve never seen them in croissants before.
100 Washington Ave. S., Mpls., 612-295-9761; 3509 W. 44th St., Mpls., 612-840-6100; 750 E. Lake St., Wayzata, 612-839-5538; pennyscoffee.com
This article originally appeared in the July 2020 issue.
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