The door to Two Sticks Bakery is propped open. A spring breeze whisks into the space, past the parade of pastries in the display case and the barista whizzing behind the lone espresso machine.
In the back, Amanda Armstrong stamps cookie cutters onto a sheet of pale dough. She weighs each treat on a food scale, pressing more dough onto the back of the cookie if it isn’t heavy enough.
When the cookies are shaped and measured to her satisfaction, they’re placed in a plastic tub lined with parchment paper. Her daffodil-yellow tank top has two sticks of butter printed on it.
It’s not always so quiet at the bakery. Only a few weeks ago, Armstrong said, there was a line out the door that reached the sidewalk and a twenty-minute wait for drinks.
“We’ve never had to keep a list of names,” Armstrong said. “We’ve never done it that way. We had to come up with a whole new system for our baristas in our front of house in order to handle the demand.”
She said customers waited for baked goods all the time, but never for coffee drinks. Most coffee shops have at least three or four espresso machines, Armstrong said, but they have a machine that only makes one drink at a time. Their intention was never to be a coffee shop.
And yet, a video on TikTok garnered tens of thousands of views and a line outside with customers going bananas for the coffee.
Earlier this month, TikTok user @nata1ie1ong posted a review video trying the banana bread latte from the bakery. As of Monday, the video had amassed more than 33,000 views.
“No wait pls gatekeep,” one user commented. "I live in the building and go like very day and everything has been sold out.”
Another video was posted the next day of a separate user taste-testing the latte, which garnered over 1,000 views.
“It does taste like banana bread,” the user said. “Pretty fucking good.”
Armstrong said Two Sticks found out about the video when the first customers came in, talking about it the day after the video was posted.
“That was like super overwhelming, because we’re just not prepared for that,” Armstrong said. “We don’t have a lot of storage space. We didn’t have a lot of bananas, we didn’t have the staff to handle all of it.”
Two Sticks Bakery posted a statement on their Facebook on April 14, addressing the long lines.
“Our bakery is small, and the kitchen is tiny,” the post read. “Everything we produce comes from this space, there is no ‘secondary production facility.’”
The post expressed that the owners, Armstrong and Kassie Jensen, wanted to keep the business small. Their goal, the post said, was not to cater to the masses or make drinks for hours on end without breaks.
“We just are not equipped to handle the reaction of hundreds of students to a viral TikTok video,” the owners wrote. “We had a lot of fun, the energy from folks was contagious, but we also did not stay true to our goal.”
Armstrong said Jensen started Two Sticks from her home, baking from her kitchen and selling at the Smithville farmer's market. The pair met working at Feast Market & Cellar in Bloomington and joined forces in 2018 to open the storefront on South Washington Street. Armstrong said she didn’t have any professional experience, just baking at home and with her mom when she was younger.
She said they never intended to open a second location, or for extra workload for themselves or their staff. For Armstrong, the focus is consistency and quality, from timing and weighing each espresso shot to baking everything in small batches from scratch.
To make the banana bread syrup, Armstrong said, they started with a base recipe from the internet and altered it to their liking, testing out roasted and unroasted bananas. It was nice that people appreciated the work that went into making the syrup, she said, and were willing to wait so long for it. But there were drawbacks to all of the attention.
Armstrong said Two Sticks’ regulars didn’t come in for three days straight after the video.
“It was like a sorority, fraternity gathering,” Armstrong said. “Like, it was awesome. But when there’s so many people here and our regulars can’t come, that’s kind of shitty. I don’t really like that feeling.”
She said everyone was working extra-long days and running to buy bananas every five minutes. While the chaos was stressful, she said it wasn’t necessarily a negative thing. The banana bread syrup is now off the menu, but the bakery is working on a new strawberry rhubarb one.
“I am not here to live a stressful life doing what I love,” Armstrong said. “Sometimes I just need that reminder, the reminder to, like, go back to what we’re supposed to be doing and what made us successful.”
