This microbakery’s cinnamon bun delivery service is what we need right now

Eight enormous cinnamon buns were dropped on my porch the other week, and I’ve been obsessed ever since. These soft, eggy brioche beauties prove that a well-made bun can be a treat from edge to edge — bucking my perception that the cinnamon-sugar center and icing-slathered top are the only good parts. The mere thought of one with a cup of black coffee has compelled me out of bed several mornings over these past few bleak weeks. And all I had to do to get them was send a text (and pay, of course).

The buns came by way of Hank’s Cinnamon Buns, an Instagram-based microbakery run by Delaware County native and former DJ Ron Davis. (Hank McCoy was Davis’ stage name when he was recording and producing.) In five years, Davis has gone from casual weekend baker to a full-time pro. He makes between 400 and 500 pounds of dough each week in a West Chester commissary kitchen, sending out hundreds of buns to weekly farmers markets and home-delivery stops.

Davis grew up loving to bake — his mom taught him the recipe for devil’s food cake when he was still in elementary school — but it wasn’t until the pandemic that he experimented with cinnamon buns, at the behest of his wife, Roxy.

“She just one day was like, ‘Cinnamon rolls are one of my favorites. Can you give it a try?’,” Davis remembers.” So I made them for the first time, and she immediately said, ‘You need to sell these.’”

Davis was living in Point Breeze at the time and took to Instagram to see if there was an audience, like a lot of bakers did in 2020. The giant swirled buns were an immediate hit. “Probably two weeks after the first time I’d ever made a single roll, I sold 30 boxes of four out of my house,” he said.

(There are arguably a couple technical differences between cinnamon buns and cinnamon rolls — the dough for buns is generally braided vs. rolled into a log, etc. — but for our purposes, they’re interchangeable.)

Davis had so many customers rolling up to his block to pick up buns that his neighbors were concerned. “To see me walking out 25 times every Saturday with a box in hand, giving it to a car on the corner, it … just created this thing,” he said, adding that he defies the stereotype of a professional baker. “There’s not that many young Black male bakers that I’ve seen.”

By 2021, Hank’s Cinnamon Buns attracted the attention of Weavers Way, the Northwest Philly food co-op. It approached Davis about baking buns for its stores. That prompted him to move production to a commissary kitchen at the Enterprise Center in West Philly. He added wholesale partners like Greenstreet Coffee and Valerio Coffee. Next, he branched out to the local farmers market circuit, starting at the East Falls market, then slowly expanding Hank’s presence to Landsdowne, Horsham, Media, Berwyn, Swarthmore, and West Chester. “I wasn’t familiar with farmers markets at all, to be honest,” Davis said. “I had never been to one.”

These days, Hank’s attends as many as 10 markets a week in the spring and summer — so many that he’s had to scale back wholesale clients. (Current wholesale partners include Greenstreet and Guzo Cafe in South Philly, Corner Stoop in Fairmount, and Twin Valley Coffee in Downingtown and West Chester.) Davis takes preorders for farmers markets and also offers home delivery to South and Southwest Philly, as well as parts of Center City and Delco.

To help him cover all this territory, Davis has a crew of four part-time employees, including some relatives. Sometimes his dad helps with cleanup. “The baking is still 99.9% me,” he says with a laugh.

Davis has made Hank’s his full-time focus; he left his job in the city’s procurement department last summer. He now bakes out of the Artisan Exchange in West Chester, home to a collection of food-based entrepreneurs. “Everybody calls each other by their products,” he said on a recent visit, pointing out the “nuts guy” and the “cheese girl.”

“I’m the bun guy.”

To supply the markets, wholesale, and a number of home-delivery customers — Hank’s has a link to order in its Instagram bio on @hankscinnamonbuns — Davis bakes four days a week. He starts around 1 a.m., mixing a brioche base and letting it rise before rolling it out to a thin layer that gets coated with a cinnamon-brown sugar-butter filling. He rolls it into a long, buttery rope that gets sliced into hefty cylinders, about 7 ounces each. The buns rise a second time before they’re baked, cooled, and frosted with cream cheese icing. On market days, Davis is out the door, buns in tow, by 8:30 a.m.

In the years Davis has been baking cinnamon buns, he’s experimented with flavor variations like red velvet, lemon (Roxy’s favorite), chocolate, banana pecan, and apple cinnamon. He often works the flavoring into the dough itself. And that’s the secret to Hank’s success: a flavorful, buttery brioche dough. It’s pillowy soft, faintly sweet, and moist throughout, creating a bun that’s a pleasure to eat whether you strike a cinnamon-sugar vein or a plain outer edge.

This was what Davis was striving for from the start. “It was always important for me to make the dough more of the star than just the icing,” Davis said. “Anything with a bunch of icing on it can taste good.”

Check hankscinnamonbuns.com or @hankscinnamonbuns on Instagram for up-to-date information. Special flavors sell for $28 per four-pack; plain buns sell for $25 per four-pack. Home delivery available to South and Southwest Philly, parts of Center City and Delaware County (Yeadon, Lansdowne, Clifton Heights, Media). Hank’s Cinnamon Buns can be found at various farmers markets, including in Havertown (1 W. Eagle Rd., 2:30-4 p.m., Feb. 19), Downingtown (28 E. Pennsylvania Ave., 10 a.m.-noon, Feb. 22), and Berwyn (511 Old Lancaster Road, 10 a.m.-1 p.m., Feb. 23). Available on Fridays at Greenstreet Coffee (1205 S. 15th St., Philadelphia, 19146), Guzo Cafe (800 S. 12th St., Philadelphia, 19147), and Twin Valley Coffee (120 N. Church St., West Chester, 19380; 100 River Station Blvd., Downingtown, 19335).