We’re on the range and in the kitchen in Wyoming with Lindsey Johnson for a sweet celebration of the holidays and her new cookbook, Wild Sugar.
Lindsey Johnson was a Southern California beach girl, born and raised on flip-flop culture and a year-round perfect climate. So when she and her husband, Jeremiah, decided to pull up stakes and move to Wyoming with their three young boys, it was truly a leap into the unknown wilderness. She could stock up on insulated boots and Carhartts, keep chains and a shovel in the trunk of her car, but nothing prepared her for the isolation, loneliness, and cabin fever of that first winter.
Johnson with her flock of hens and a basket of fresh eggs for baking.
“That first year in Jackson turned out to be the most challenging of my life,” she admits in the foreword to her new cookbook, Wild Sugar: Seasonal Sweet Treats Inspired by the Mountain West. Their cabin, though romantic, was a half-hour drive from town, schools, and support. Her husband, a builder of high-end homes, was gone for weeks at a time working on projects in California, while Lindsey had given up her decade-long career as a successful interior designer. And the physical reality was so different: She’d traded sea for mountains, beaches for trails, sea lions and pelicans for wolves and grizzly bears. Living in Wyoming was inspiring but intimidating, at times glorious, at times outright dangerous. “I was in this beautiful place,” she writes, “but I had never felt more lost and lonely. I began to fear we had made a mistake.”
Her lowest moment came when she fell while shoveling her car out during a snowstorm in order to get her kids to the library in town, her one refuge. But the moment became a turning point: When she got to the library, she struck up a conversation with a local who proceeded to tell her about bison — how, when a storm is approaching, they face into and walk through it rather than retreat. From that moment, Johnson decided to “be the buffalo.” And, having found solace in the kitchen before when she was younger, she decided baking would be her way to get through the storm.
Along with recipes, Wild Sugar includes Western lore; tips for baking, decorating, and displaying desserts; holiday table settings; and finding inspiration in nature.
Eight years later, Johnson finds herself living an hour south of Jackson in Freedom, Wyoming, on a 20-acre farmstead on the Salt River, complete with a modest farmhouse (to which her husband added a charming baker’s kitchen) and vintage outbuildings that house goats, chickens, and pet pigs. Her kids are happily in school, her husband builds beautiful houses, and she has found her calling in catering weddings, making special-occasion cakes, and, under the name Lady in the Wild West, interacting with her passionate and ever-growing online community.
The most recent of her creative endeavors, Wild Sugar features her spectacular, highly original creations, from tiered wedding cakes to hand-painted cookies, as well as every hand-formed rustic dessert in between. Divided by season and sprinkled among more than 50 recipes and mouthwatering photos — shot by Johnson herself — are sidebars unveiling tricks of the baking trade, chronicling life in Wyoming, and highlighting local artisans and traditions that inspire her work. She also details specifics of her decorating techniques for bakers hoping to emulate her effects.
The cookbook includes recipes for mouthwatering deserts like Death by Chocolate Cookies and Nutella Banana Bread (get the recipes).
Love for her newfound home — the mountains and rivers, the lifestyle, the plants and wildlife — permeates every page, and every recipe, in Wild Sugar. Johnson bakes from the heart, and, as is clear in her book, her heart is in Wyoming.
Read our complete interview with Lindsey Johnson as well as some of her Wild Sugar recipes.
From our November/December 2024 issue.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Lindley Rust, Lindsey Johnson
