Emie Dunagan’s path to pastry chefdom reads like a casebook study. “I started out using an Easy-Bake oven, but once I got to elementary school, my grandmother began teaching me all of her grandmother’s recipes,” Dunagan says. “Sometimes I would experiment. I would use only egg whites instead of egg yolks to figure out the reason we follow the recipe.” At age sixteen, while still attending high school in Louisville, Dunagan launched a baking business. Her grandmother was her first employee. A month after graduation, she started culinary school and took a job at the 502 Bar & Bistro, the Louisville hot spot that blends executive chef Ming Pu’s Southern and Taiwanese traditions. Now twenty-one, Dunagan is continuing her education as part of the Women Chefs Initiative, a mentorship program founded by Louisville chef Edward Lee to help women find higher-ranking jobs in the restaurant industry. Like nearly all of Dunagan’s recipes, this irresistible cookie and ice cream combination harks back to her first female mentor, and the berry-picking trips they’d take when she was a child. At 502, she serves it in a bowl. “If you scoop it all up into one bite with a spoon, you get the burst of the berry, the crunch of the Corn Nuts, the salt off the top of the cookies, and the creaminess of the ice cream,” Dunagan says. “But if you want to put it together like an ice cream sandwich and eat it like a kid, that’s cool, too.”
