Merry Bear's Kitchen
Specialty Food Artisan
About
Bentonville's gourmet macarons! Merry Bear's macarons are the best. Merry Bear's Kitchen brings fresh, from scratch croissants and pastries every week to the Bentonville Farmer's Market. Come try specialty macarons and pastries done to the level that you won't find outside of Paris.:)
Programs and Partners
Location
Bentonville, AR
Manager
Daniel and Charity Howell
Charity has a background in chemical engineering and software development. When her daughter wanted macarons for a birthday in 2012, Charity turned her kitchen into a lab and started on a journey to perfect them.
She optimized the heating cycle of the oven, the protein content of the egg whites, and the timing of the macaronage cycle down to the second. She accounts for variables like barometric pressure, humidity, and ambient temperature when creating each batch over its two-day preparation cycle. Seven years later, and thousands of macarons later, Charity had developed hundreds of her own recipes for fillings, macarons, and specialty pastries and she finally felt confident enough to start selling her bakes.
She started Merry Bear's Kitchen in 2019 and began selling at the farmer's market in 2020. She has loved sharing her pastries with Bentonville. She sells macarons in sets of 6 for maximum flavor enjoyment and each batch is done with precision to give her customers the best experience possible. In 2021, Charity took a course in French pastries and began perfecting her croissants and laminated doughs. After a couple years of experiments, in 2023, Charity began selling croissants and laminated dough pastries (danish, cruffins, palmiers, etc) as well as her macarons.
Most of her customers tell her the macarons and croissants are as good as what they have eaten in France. A visiting French pastry chef once stopped by incognito. He soon admitted he was a chef and that her macarons are as good as any he has had. Another customer bought a box for her French husband’s birthday. A few moments later, she returned with her husband who wanted to buy more boxes. We watched as he then pulled out his phone to call his sister in France to say that he finally found macarons that were as good as the ones back home. Needless to say, Charity was flattered. She has regulars who travel to Bentonville from Oklahoma City, Kansas City, Dallas, and one customer of hers comes yearly from Miami, in order to get more of her macarons and pastries.
Charity loves being at the Bentonville Farmers Market and interacting with the customers and other vendors there. “When I get to the market and see all the people happy to get my bakes, I know this is why I work so hard,” she said.
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