This story originally aired in the Jan. 19, 2025 episode of Inside Appalachia.
Sometimes, when I open my front door, I find a little aluminum pie plate there on my front step. Without looking, I know what’s under the clear plastic lid: several little cinnamon rolls, drenched in icing.
But this isn’t the work of Doordash or UberEats. It’s a delivery from my down-the-street neighbor Kim Kerr. She makes these cinnamon rolls — and a lot of other good stuff — to sell at farmers markets around Charleston, West Virginia through her small business Whimsy and Willows.
She brings my family the ugly, misshapen ones that she can’t sell. But I can attest, they taste just fine.
After a couple years of these surprise deliveries, I finally asked her how she got into the cinnamon roll business. The story, it turns out, involved some real detective work. She invited me and my microphone over to hear the tale while she made a batch.
This all started when Kerr and her husband Patrick launched their business. It was a little rough going at first.
“We started with jam and realized everybody has jam,” Kerr says. “I like baking, so I was like ‘Well, I will get some of Sylvia’s recipes.’ Because she had phenomenal recipes.”
Sylvia Iuukko-Mann is Kerr’s great aunt. And she was the family baker. Whether she came to visit Kerr’s parents, or they saw her at family reunions in Massachusetts, Sylvia was always baking up a storm.
“We would have to go to the store with Sylvia and buy packets of yeast and buy all of this stuff,” Kerr says.
Photo Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
She made everything, from dinner rolls to gargantuan wedding cakes. But her speciality — and the family’s favorite — was nisu, a sweet braided cardamom-flavored yeast bread native to Finland.
“Finnish people are big on drinking coffee, so it’s a coffee bread. So it was just always, always there,” Kerr says.
Like nisu, Kerr’s family is originally from Finland. Her great-grandfather Matti Iuukko, Sylvia’s father, immigrated from there as part of a wave of European immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
While Matti and his family ended up in Massachusetts, a small but mighty group of Finns ended up in central Appalachia. These Finnish immigrants made their home largely in southwestern Pennsylvania, where they established community groups, churches and even a support organization to help one another pay for medical expenses and funerals. An offshoot of that group moved down to Weirton, Clarksburg and Charleston to work in steel mills and foundries.
The Finnish culture here disappeared as people either moved off when the work dried up or stayed and assimilated into the larger culture. Kerr’s family, meanwhile, was able to stay connected to their roots and often attended Finnish heritage festivals down in Florida, where nisu was a regular feature. But none of it tasted quite as good Sylvia’s.
“Hers is more ooey-gooey, is the best way we can describe it,” Kerr says.
She wanted to bring some of that ooey-gooey goodness to her farmers market stand. There were just a few problems. For one, she’d never made nisu before — or any kind of bread. But more importantly, Sylvia wasn’t around anymore to teach her how to make it.
Kerr got in touch with one of Sylvia’s nieces, the family’s de facto historian. She was able to track down one of Sylvia’s recipe cards. But it wasn’t quite complete.
The card listed the ingredients. It told Kerr what temperature to set her oven to. But it contained no directions. Kerr took what information she could glean from that card and filled in the gaps with nisu recipes she found online, and made her first attempt at her childhood favorite.
“It wasn’t a disaster but it wasn’t right,” she says.
It wasn’t that ooey, gooey texture she remembered. So she reached out to Larry Mann, one of Sylvia’s sons. He found another incomplete recipe. This one had ingredients, but not the measurements for them, though it did have the steps.
“She taught enough people that I was able to put it kinda sorta together,” Kerr says.
This new recipe fragment revealed a few of Sylvia’s tricks. The milk must be almost boiling, and have butter melted into it. And unlike what some online recipes say, you can’t add everything to the stand mixer at once.
The first batch she made following her dear aunt Sylvia’s order of operations turned out perfect. It was just as ooey and gooey as she remembered. Sylvia’s son Larry agreed.
“He comes to visit us every few years and he will say ‘This is just like my mother’s. This is my mother’s,’” Kerr says. “The first time he said that I was like, ‘Good. We nailed it.’”
In reviving her family favorite, Kerr — who moved to West Virginia in 2007 — had also unknowingly brought back a dish that once would have been common in certain parts of the state.
Photo Credit: Zack Harold/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
It wasn’t long after Kerr cracked the nisu code that inspiration struck for a new twist on the family favorite.
It was 2020. Like all of us, Kerr was stuck at home during COVID lockdowns. She got a hankering for some cinnamon rolls, but couldn’t go anywhere to get them. So she decided to make her own.
“I’m looking up recipes for cinnamon rolls and it’s calling for yeast bread,” Kerr says. “And I thought, ‘I don’t know how to make yeast bread.’” But I know how to make nisu which has yeast and it’s a bread. I wonder if I can make that into a cinnamon roll.”
Instead of forming the dough into long snakes and braiding it together, as she does for nisu, Kerr rolled the dough into a flat square and covered it with melted butter and a cinnamon-sugar mixture. She rolled it into a log, cut that log into medallions and put those medallions in pie pans to rise for about 45 minutes. Then she put them in the oven.
It turns out that sweet, ooey-gooey nisu dough made perfect cinnamon rolls. There was still one piece missing, though. She needed icing to go on top.
Kerr originally considered a cream cheese icing, but West Virginia cottage food laws forbid items that require refrigeration. She went online and found a recipe for a shelf stable alternative. It involves a whole bunch of sugar, a whole stick of melted butter and four teaspoons of vanilla.
“But I kind of cheat and do more than four,” Kerr says.
Those ingredients get whipped together in the stand mixer and drizzled generously over piping hot cinnamon rolls.
“Nobody’s ever eaten a cinnamon roll and said ‘That’s too much icing,’” Kerr says. “We’ve seen otherwise prim and proper people who will lick the pan when they think no one’s looking.”
It wasn’t long before the cinnamon rolls — which Kerr’s husband dubbed “Finn-amon” rolls — became her most popular item.
“I think my favorite compliment was the teenage boy who took a sample. He was definitely a farm boy and had his boots and everything,” Kerr says. “He turned around and came back and said ‘These are the best cinnamon rolls I’ve ever had in my life’ and bought some more.”
Kerr is now taking steps to make sure this new family favorite isn’t lost to time, as great-aunt Sylvia’s recipe almost was. Her 13-year-old son Jackson has recently shown an interest in baking, so she plans to put him to work on the Finn-amon roll assembly line.
But if anyone else in the family wants to give it a try…they might run into an issue.
“I don’t have an actual recipe that I follow, I just mix it together,” Kerr says. “I should write it down. I will have to do that.”
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This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts and culture.
