New Orem cafe offers cherished family cinnamon roll recipe for public consumption
Nancy Whitney, affectionately known as “Mema,” knows a good pastry when she tastes one, and also has a knack for taking an idea and making it her own.
In the late 1970s, Mema, who resided in Southern California at the time, was enjoying a cinnamon roll that she purchased while on a visit in Salt Lake City.
According to Chrisi Hammer, Mema’s daughter and co-owner and founder of Sunshine Buns Cafe in Orem, the cinnamon roll was unlike anything she’d ever tasted. “She’s from Los Angeles, so there’s really great, wonderful food there. But she had never tasted a cinnamon roll like she had tasted one in Salt Lake,” Hammer said.
However, the deliciousness of the roll sparked an idea in Mema’s head to make her own from scratch. “So she went home, and she said, ‘I could certainly make a cinnamon roll to top that, and I’m going to figure it out,'” Hammer explained. “So, she went home, and she reverse engineered this cinnamon roll and created what we have come to believe is possibly the best dough there ever was, which really makes the cinnamon roll top tier.”
Mema called them “sunshine buns” because of their texture and look — or as Hammer would describe them, their “beachy vibes.”
Mema was never interested in going into business, but she baked batches of the buns for fundraisers, church groups and community events and sold tons of rolls for years in California, where she built a loyal base of people who enjoyed them.
“It has a lot of roots in Southern California, and the community really rallied behind this bun,” Hammer said.
For years, Hammer said she tried to persuade her mother to consider a business venture, but to avail. “And then when she moved to Utah in 2017, I said, ‘Mom, I want to sell these cinnamon rolls.’ And she said, ‘I don’t want to,'” Hammer recounted. “She said, ‘I did that for decades in fundraisers, and I think that’s so awesome that you have an entrepreneurial spirit to do that, but I’m not interested in doing that.'”
While Mema, now in her late 70s, never wanted to go the business route, it didn’t stop Hammer and her best friend Kass Martin from exploring it.
“One day, I was talking to Kass and I said, ‘Hey, let’s start a cinnamon roll company after Mema’s sunshine buns,’ which of course, she had already had and knew how great they were,” Hammer said.
The piping-hot idea really started to bake one night in the fall of 2022 while the two were on a double date at the Hale Center Theater and they finally made the decision go full steam ahead with the plan. “Halfway through the play, we’re just excited sitting there, you know, already planning in my head, and she’s planning in her head, and she leans over to me and she says in my ear, in the middle of the play, ‘Sunshine buns … delivering sunshine one bun at a time,’ which now is the company’s tagline.”
Hammer and Martin are both co-owners of the business with their husbands. Mema also has a small part in the ownership. The duo got Mema’s blessing to start a company and began making sure they had the recipe models down pat.
Martin said initially they opted to offer home deliveries to gauge interest in the community. “So, the night that we were at the play, we got everything settled with the website and with an Instagram page, and then we started doing daily orders and daily deliveries and just to see, to test our product first.”
After turning their kitchens into bakeries and delivering buns across Utah County, testing the product for about six months, they secured and signed the lease on their first brick and mortar location in the spring of 2023.
The establishment sits in what was formerly known as The Italian Place restaurant on State Street in Orem just north of University Parkway. Hammer, who also runs an interior design firm, used her construction and design skills, working with their team to completely gut, remodel and rejuvenate the former restaurant.
“It really has the essence of you walk in and you feel that sunshine, you feel better, you feel connected. And we want it to be a place where people come for a date night, they come for a girl’s lunch, they come for family gathering,” Martin said.
The cafe promises an upbeat atmosphere, serving cinnamon rolls, tasty buns and drinks.
Martin says in addition to Mema’s signature roll with cream cheese frosting, they plan to have a list of rotating flavors like a banana cream pie, cookies and cream, Oreo, peach cobbler, apple pie and many others. Unlike most cinnamon roll offerings, Martin and Hammer say it’s the dough that makes a sunshine bun stand out.
“It has that sense of like my grandma made this,” Martin described. “It has that homemade flavor.”
Venturing into business with your best friend can come with certain challenges or in some cases may end a friendship. But these co-owners both share the vision of bringing Mema’s passion for baking to more people in an inviting space to enjoy a piece of family tradition that aims to please with each bite.
“And that really has been an easy vision for us to maintain, because really it started with Mema’s love and affection for people and getting these buns to people who needed that pick me up, or who needed help raising money, or whatever it may be. And now we’re able to bring that same essence into this store,” Martin said.
Sunshine Buns is holding its grand opening this weekend at 1086 S. State St. in Orem.
The plan is to be open seven days a week from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and close at 11 p.m. on the weekends. Sunday hours will be 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.