Bake at 180 degrees then upload to TikTok: Meet the 70-year-old baker who’s gone viral

All I want to do is lick my fingers. Each one is thoroughly speckled with cinnamon-laced brown sugar soaked with warm melted butter. I’m dimpling this hard-to-resist mixture into a supple potato-powered dough, which will soon be baked in the 19th-century beehive oven blazing away beside me.

“That’s very good. Keep going,” encourages Sister Deborah, my 70-year-old instructor for this afternoon’s baking class at the 200-year-old Winkler Bakery. I’m in historic Old Salem Museums & Gardens in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, learning how to make sugar cake, a favorite in Moravian culinary culture, a German-influenced, Czech-adjacent cuisine that came to this region with Moravian settlers who founded Salem in 1753.

Just four-foot, nine-inches tall, Sister Deborah (known as Deborah Crews when she is off-site) is dressed in modest garb, traditional in the bakery’s founding era: Frilled white bonnet, blue and white plaid apron, and flower-freckled blouse. The only inkling of modernity are her glasses. A quick look at my phone would reveal another notable connection to the 21st century: TikTok stardom.

Late last year, she was filmed for an impromptu, two-minute video sitting in front of the bakery’s crackling fire, rolling out Moravian sugar cookies, while narrating her work in a soothing, grandmotherly tone.

She didn’t think anything more of it until a couple of weeks later when she was told it had racked up half a million views and hundreds of comments on TikTok. She still sounds astonished when talking about it—but her reaction pales in comparison to the texts and calls from some of her 28 grandchildren, who were happily shocked to see her go viral in a space ruled by their generation.

“There were some very strong women who worked and lived in this bakery. I pull from their energy, because when I leave here, I don’t have that same energy.”

- Sister Deborah

Since her breakout moment, Sister Deborah has filmed a handful of further clips, including upcoming posts focusing on breadmaking and how she crafts the bakery’s famed Moravian sugar cake. Her online fame has translated into real-world interest from visitors, who stop by the bakery to see the sweet, cookie-making grandma from TikTok.

Sister Deborah traveled an unconventional path to this unexpected moment. She grew up on a tobacco farm in the countryside just outside Winston-Salem, where toiling in the fields was not her happy place. From the age of 14, she secured a series of food-focused jobs, including working at a soda fountain-ice cream parlor, crafting candies and wedding cakes, and managing a surf-and-turf restaurant.

A decade and a half ago, in her mid-50s, Sister Deborah was injured in a car accident, an event that forced her to seek out work that required less walking. Though her family has no Moravian roots, she applied for a position in Old Salem, where she came on field trips as a youngster—as she loves kids, she thought it would be fun to work with school groups.

She was hired by the Winkler Bakery, a cornerstone of the community built in 1807 with uncut rocks and handmade bricks, which proclaims itself the oldest continually operating bakery in America.

Sister Deborah’s official title is interpreter, meaning she brings history alive by acting like she is living and working in the past. The transformation begins by donning her 19th-century working clothes.

“If I have on my regular clothes and come into the bakery—even if it’s a day we’re not going to be open—I feel really out of place,” she tells me. She considers herself part of Winkler’s larger continuum: “There were some very strong women who worked and lived in this bakery. I pull from their energy, because when I leave here, I don’t have that same energy.”

Educating younger guests is her favorite work, which is why she is especially excited by her TikTok break-out. She sees sharing the past as a way to guide the present generation as they navigate the future.

She needs all the extra oomph she can muster. Without all the modern machinery and conveniences of a contemporary kitchen, baking is tiring, tedious, and time-consuming work—and there are no instruction manuals. “The only way to learn how to bake with a fire in a brick oven is to do it,” she says. “There’s not a culinary class for it.”

First, doughs are made in large a wooden trough, the ingredients mixed using a pair of large wooden paddles, the same way it has been done for hundreds of years. The beehive oven must be hand-loaded with a mixture of red and white oak, which burns hot and long, but doesn’t infuse the baked goods with too much flavor, as hickory or mesquite would. When the logs are reduced to coal, they are spread across the nine-foot deep, seven-foot-wide oven using a heavy steel rake. 

At this point, the temperature will be anywhere from 600-800 degrees, so the oven’s doors are shut as the baker waits for the temperature to lower. Since no thermometers were used when the bakery opened, Sister Deborah must use an alternate method to determine it’s ready, such as tossing a pinch of cornmeal or flour across the floor of the oven.

“If it’s too hot, it’ll slide across making a tss-tss-tss sound, like water evaporating,” she says. “If it slides across while taking on a golden brown, that’s the perfect temperature.”

Finally, she loads up the oven with as many as 124 Moravian sugar cakes, a process that must be done swiftly, since everything starts to bake immediately. Around 18 to 22 minutes later, she pulls them out, bringing with them the cozy scents of cinnamon, caramelized brown sugar, and woodsmoke.

As well as baking and hosting demonstrations of signature items, Sister Deborah manages the business and interacts with visitors. Educating younger guests is her favorite work, which is why she is especially excited by her TikTok break-out. She sees sharing the past as a way to guide the present generation as they navigate the future.

“History is so important to know because some history you don’t want to repeat, while some history is wonderful to hold onto,” she says. “Any little seed I can plant is the most important thing to me.”

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