A few years ago, a mother walked up to a folding-table booth at the Lake Saint Louis Farmers & Artists Market with a list of questions. Was everything gluten-free? Any soy? What about the allergen details on each item? Her son stood beside her, waiting for the usual answer that narrows his options down to almost nothing. Instead, the woman behind the table told him he could have anything on it. His eyes went wide. It was, by his own mother's account, one of the first times in his life he'd been handed a full menu instead of a short one.
That table belonged to Kristen Gassel, and this June, after six years of Saturday mornings at that same market, her brand finally got a front door. Kris Miss Small Batch Bake Shop opened its first storefront at 11102 Veterans Memorial Parkway, a few minutes off Lake Saint Louis Boulevard. If you've driven past it and wondered why a bakery with almost no seating and weekend-only hours is already drawing a line, the answer isn't luck. It's the six years it spent proving itself under a set of rules that never bent.
Six Years Under One Rule
Gassel didn't start out trying to build a business. In 2020, home with two young children and unable to find safe sweets for her son's dietary needs, she started baking her own and posting the results to a small Facebook group in exchange for honest feedback. The response was strong enough that she kept going, eventually taking a booth at the Lake Saint Louis Farmers & Artists Market, held Saturdays from 8 a.m. to noon at The Meadows shopping center from April through October.
That market has one rule that matters more than most people realize: everything sold has to be grown, raised, or crafted by the vendor within 100 miles, and resale isn't allowed. There's no shortcut version of a booth there. You either make the thing yourself, locally, or you don't have a table. This season the market opened with 127 vendors, which gives some sense of how much local production actually clears that bar every week.
For Kris Miss, that bar became a six-year audition. Every batch had to hold up against the same standard, week after week, in front of the same regulars, long before there was a lease to sign or a storefront to staff.
The List That Never Gets Shorter
What makes Kris Miss unusual isn't that it offers gluten-free options. Plenty of bakeries do, usually as one section of a larger case. Gassel built the entire shop around a single, non-negotiable standard. Every item sold is:
- Vegan
- Gluten-free
- Soy-free
- Corn-free
- Dairy-free
- Free of artificial flavors and dyes
There's no side menu and no exception aisle. That's the whole case.
The most telling detail is how far that standard goes. Gassel has started adding items safe for people managing alpha-gal syndrome, a tick-borne condition that can trigger a reaction to mammalian meat and dairy. Nearly everything in the shop already qualifies, with one exception: anything containing vegan marshmallows, because the plant-based carrageenan used to set them can itself cause a reaction for alpha-gal customers. That's a level of ingredient tracking most bakeries never have reason to think about, let alone build a menu around.
What's Actually in the Case
The seasonal rotation keeps the shop from feeling like a one-note allergen list. Recent scone flavors have included peach and strawberry. Sandwich cookies come in lemon graham and s'mores, and the brookies, cookies baked directly into a brownie, have become one of the shop's more popular items. For drinks, Gassel pulls espresso and lattes using beans from Laney Roasting Company, a small-batch roaster based in St. Charles, with a three-ingredient organic coconut milk and a maple syrup base standing in for flavored syrups.
None of that reads like a compromise menu. It reads like a bakery that happens to also solve a real problem for people who've spent years asking eight questions before they could order a cookie.
A Storefront the Size of a Living Room
Walk in and the space matches the modest hours: a pastry case and order counter on one side of the room, a handful of bar-style seats along a window ledge, sage-green walls and light wood keeping the whole thing feeling calm rather than cramped. Right now Kris Miss is open Fridays from 3 to 7 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., a schedule that still leans on the same weekend rhythm the shop grew up on at the farmers market.
Gassel has been open about what she wants the space to become. Her stated goal is to build something less like a bakery and more like a place people stick around in, and customers are already lingering over their coffee longer than the seat count really allows. As she put it, her passion lies more with helping people than with the baking itself. Given how the shop got here, that's not just a nice line. It's the whole business model.
Two Doors Down
The Veterans Memorial Parkway stretch that Kris Miss now calls home isn't a destination corridor the way Meadow Circle has become with its restaurant cluster. It's quieter, but it's not empty. Cloud 9 Comics and Games sits in the same small retail run, a comic book and tabletop gaming shop that's built its own following among collectors and hobbyists in Lake St. Louis. Put a dedicated allergen-free bakery next to a comic shop that's been a neighborhood fixture for years, and you get a stretch of storefronts that rewards a slow walk more than a quick drive-by.
That's easy to miss if you're only paying attention to the parts of town that show up on every list. It's exactly the kind of detail that separates a resident who actually knows this town from someone reading a summary of it.
Why the Six Years Matters
A lot of food businesses open with more square footage, more seating, and more hours than Kris Miss has right now, and plenty of them don't make it past the first year. Kris Miss opened with almost none of that cushion and is already busy enough that customers linger past the available seats. The difference isn't marketing. It's that the bakery spent six years getting judged by the same standard every single Saturday before it ever asked anyone to sign a lease with its name on it. By the time the storefront opened, there was nothing left to prove. There was just a menu that had already earned its regulars, one farmers market morning at a time.
If you live in Lake St. Louis, that's worth knowing next time you're deciding where to grab a coffee on a Saturday morning. And if you're the kind of person who pays attention to which corners of a town are quietly filling in with small, well-run businesses, that's usually a good sign for the neighborhood around them too. The Lisa Adkins Team has spent years watching which pockets of St. Charles County build that kind of staying power. If you're curious what else is changing in Lake St. Louis or ready to talk about buying or selling here, schedule your free consultation and we'll walk you through what we're seeing on the ground.
