What can you do with a master’s degree in English? For Heather Degeyter, the answer was to whip up the sweetest bakery-bookstore her hometown has ever seen. Her dual business, Bonne Vie Macarons and Book Club & Co., opened this past summer in downtown Lafayette, a bright and cheery spot that is already drawing local fans and curious visitors.
The shop sits not far from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where Degeyter studied English as an undergraduate and English literature as a grad student. She taught English in the Louisiana State University system for a few years and then fell deep into a baking hobby. “I left college teaching to bake, and what started as me baking at home has since kind of blown up,” she says. “Now I see the girls from the university study and shop here, and I realized this is the store I would have wanted in college.”
Degeyter pairs books for sale with the treats in her bakery case. For a Golden Girls Cozy Mystery Series event, she riffed on cheesecake desserts (the preferred sweet of the original Golden Girls). This fall’s cookbook club will read and test recipes from Mississippi chef John Currence’s Tailgreat; the mystery and romance book clubs settled on autumnal titles.
The bookstore sits on one end, a seating area that plays host to reading clubs on the other, and right in the middle of it all is the bakery with macarons, petits fours, coffee, and on event nights, a full bar where the champagne and conversations flow.
Find more information about what’s on tap for the book clubs here.
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