About

Being gifted a plastic hand mixer for her sixth birthday may well have stirred up a career idea for Jessica Clayton.

Fast forward nearly 20 years and Jessica - who has fond childhood memories of hours spent in the kitchen with her mum and grandmother - has recently launched a business that's all about baking. Scroll Station came to be in November last year and is fast gaining traction in the greater Dunedin area where Jessica lives.

Jessica's business making sweet and savoury scrolls started as a side hustle while she worked as a baker at a beach-side café in Dunedin's St Clair. The idea grew from the many compliments she received from café patrons about her cinnamon scroll baking prowess.

“I thought, maybe I should come up with a scroll that has various fillings and toppings,” says Jessica, who is armed with a Bachelor of Culinary Arts coupled with valuable kitchen experience as both a chef and baker.

Word about Jessica's scroll-making ability spread, especially once she dipped her toes in the water at Mosgiel's Wingatui Market.

“I started attending the market in November last year as I was keen to see if my scrolls would sell. I made a small batch that sold out within the hour. People were really interested and asked how they could get them more often. So, my business rapidly progressed to weekly online orders, with deliveries on Sunday,” Jessica tells.

 At the time she was working Monday to Friday at the café and making and delivering scrolls on the weekend. Sales of her scrolls, deemed scrumptious, soon indicated that wasn't a sustainable working life.

Scroll Station become a stand-alone, full-time business in April, with that timing matching scroll demand. Dunedin's Artisan Pantry provides Jessica with a registered commercial kitchen to work from. There she makes a few hundred scrolls for the markets, a couple of hundred for weekly orders, and the scrolls within Artisan Pantry's café cabinet are her handiwork too. Mosgiel folk don't have to travel far for their scroll fix either as she supplies The Urban Foodstore there.

The chance of finding Jessica's scrolls at markets has increased as she now has a stall once a month at both the Wingatui and Waitati markets. Increasing online orders has seen deliveries split over two days– Thursdays and Saturdays – and there are pick-up options on

Saturday too. Boxes of two, four, or six scrolls are on offer and Jessica's stoked to note they seem to appeal to all age groups. If the delivery is a special one, let Jessica know and a message and bow becomes part of the service.

Schools, workplaces, and student flats are amongst common delivery addresses. Students spreading the word via Instagram have increased her following “for sure”. She's also open to catering opportunities.

“It's all grown a lot more quickly than I thought it would,” says this business owner who has a lengthy obsession with cinnamon scrolls to thank for her success.

As a young teen, she began compiling a Pinterest folder of different-styled scrolls she wanted to make. She quickly realised not too many flavours were available in New Zealand.

Scroll Station has changed that. About a dozen different flavours (mostly sweet) are available. Current savoury options are caramelised onion, feta and cream cheese, with onion relish on top; and ham savoury, incorporating ham, spinach, tomato relish, cream cheese and cheese. Jessica plans to add to her savoury scroll repertoire, especially as they are big sellers at the markets.

As for the sweets, tempters joining the original cinnamon are apple crumble, pinky with a caramel centre, lemon meringue, biscoff, oreo, strawberry blondie cheesecake and banoffee.

“Some really are quite loaded”, Jessica laughs, like the strawberry blondie with its cheesecake centre, strawberry cream cheese icing, topped with a drizzle of raspberry coulee and freeze-dried strawberry and biscuit crumble.  Or the lemon meringue scroll, with lemon curd at its centre, blow torched gooey lemon meringue on top joined by passionfruit drizzle and candied lemon.

Those unsure whether it's sweet or savoury they're after, may wish to sink their teeth into the maple bacon scroll.

“It's a sweet and salty offering loaded up with quite a bit of bacon, topped with maple cream cheese icing and candied bacon. People thought it was a bit different but it's now a hot seller,” Jessica tells.

Unsurprisingly, scroll production involves a lot of prepping, especially as she makes her fillings from scratch too – all this is tackled during the week. She has a dough mixer, but everything is hand-rolled. That impacts quantity, Jessica acknowledges, so the plan is to attain a suitable dough roller to assist the process.  It will be a worthwhile investment as Scroll Station looks set to continue expanding. Shipping options to meet queries coming from the North Island is one thing being considered, for example.

“My business is lots of work, but I feel balanced as I am very lucky to do something I really enjoy every day,” Jessica says.

As for her favourite scroll? Cinnamon remains king. A perfect one, she says, has cream cheese icing and a gooey centre!