There is a sweet new addition at the Anchuca Historic Mansion & Inn. Owners Sam and Anna Kate Andrews have converted the home’s pool house into a professional kitchen. And now Anna Kate has ample room to grow her business — Macarons by AK.

Before the renovation, Anna Kate was baking out of the couple’s home and space was tight — especially since she was now also making cakes, cupcakes and cake pops.

“It was just taking over our house,” Anna Kate said of all her baking. “Especially since I had a full-sized rolling rack that measures nearly six feet tall and over two feet wide in our home kitchen.”

Sam and Anna Kate live in one of the small houses that former Anchuca owner Tom Pharr built in the historic part of Vicksburg.

Because Pharr knew cooking space was stretched thin for Anna Kate, he suggested that she and Sam buy Anchuca. Pharr, who owned the home for more than 20 years, had had it on the market and who better to carry on the mansion’s history than two sixth-generation Vicksburgers?

“Tom knew I needed some kitchen space, and he started telling us the pool house would be a really great place to turn into a kitchen,” Anna Kate said. “And then it eventually turned into, ‘You know we might as well buy Anchuca.’”

The couple purchased the historic home a little more than two years ago. Renovations on the pool house that now includes ovens for baking, an oversized sink, commercial refrigerators and an upstairs loft for Anna Kate’s office, began in August 2024.

Unlike most, Anna Kate said she found the renovation process relaxing.

“I was so excited; it was all I could think about,” she said.

In designing the kitchen Anna Kate said she used Canva software to help her plan around electrical and plumbing, and it also allowed her to identify problems before the kitchen was physically done.

“I also used Pinterest to find specifics like the flooring, tile backsplash and cabinets,” she said.

Anna Kate confessed there were changes that had to be made once they began moving equipment into the kitchen, but the main items like the ovens, sink, refrigerator and freezer’s placement remained as planned.

Making Macarons 

Not to confuse macarons with macaroons, which are drop cookies made with coconut, a macaron, Anna Kate said, is a meringue-based sandwich cookie that is made with almond flour, egg whites, confectioners’ sugar and food coloring. Macarons also have a filling that can include buttercream, ganache, and fruit-based jams.

Anna Kate said she got her professional start at selling macarons while she was a senior at the University of Mississippi. Her employer at the Cakery in Oxford (now Bremma’s Cakery & Confections) saw a Facebook post of the macarons she had made to top off her mother’s birthday cake and asked if she was interested in making them at their bakery.

“She asked me if I wanted to bake them in her kitchen and sell them in her store,” Anna Kate said.

And bake them she did.

For the first Valentine’s Day after she started making macarons at the Cakery, Anna Kate said she made more than 2,000 macarons.

“So, without them (the Cakery) I would not have this business, which is very hard to imagine,” she said.

Anna Kate said that while she thought she knew all there was to know when she first started baking macarons, in reality she did not. It has only been through trial and error that she learned how to make the process more consistent.

“When my boss at The Cakery offered to let me use their kitchen and sell my macarons through their storefront, I had only made them twice. I was overconfident in how much I knew about them. I spent the next year and even sometimes today figuring out little tricks to avoid them from cracking, spreading too much, not rising, and/or breaking when you remove them from the mat,” she said.

Since practice makes perfect, Anna Kate said she now prefers making macarons over a two-day period because there are so many “little steps” one must do.

“Once you make the batter and pipe them out, which can be a long process in itself, they have to rest until the tops aren’t sticky anymore,” she said.

Fortunately, Anna Kate said she has finally mastered this step.

“Now I can tell when the batter is ready just by looking at it and feeling how thick it is,” she said.

The next step is the baking, which takes approximately 18 minutes. After removing the macarons from the oven, Anna Kate said she lets them cool on the rolling rack — remember the big rack that took up so much room in the couple’s home kitchen? — before transferring them to the freezer.

“That’s the easiest way to get them off the baking mat without breaking them,” she said.

Before moving her business into the renovated pool house at Anchuca, Anna Kate said, due to the lengthy process required in making macarons it was a challenge sometimes to balance filling orders and preparing meals for she and Sam.

“The kitchen I was in wasn’t made for baking. It was our home kitchen so I had to work around us cooking dinner and it was hard to be efficient, so I always ended up kind of getting things done at the last minute,” she said, adding there were times she would even have to get up at 3 a.m. to begin baking because she did not have enough refrigerator space to store all her orders.

“Sam probably regretted his offer to let me bake in the house,” Anna Kate laughed. “But he said the only thing that really bothered him were the sticky floors.”

Anna Kate has definitely put her spin on making macarons.

“I like how unique and versatile they are. You can decorate them like a sugar cookie with royal icing, but you can also stack them and decorate them like a cake. They’re also so easy to make into different flavors. You can add certain flavors to the shell itself, but you can also fill it with any kind of icing and/or jam. You can then top it off by dipping the top shell in chocolate or covering it in Biscoff cookies. There’s no limit to what you can do,” she said.

Which is why many of her specialty cakes and cupcakes are decorated with macarons.

As for the cake pops, Anna Kate said she didn’t like to see anything go to waste, so when she has to cut a cake to form a certain shape, she uses the left overs for her cake pops.

Anna Kate said her new kitchen at Anchuca has been a game changer.

“Now I don’t have to wake up at 3 or 4 in the morning,” she said. “I get to have a normal sleep schedule now.”