Jasmine Macon’s Resilience Keeps Beyond Amazing Donuts Thriving

“Beware the ides of March.” It’s an expression inspired by the assassination of Julius Caesar to forewarn of an impending tragedy or collapse. But for Jasmine Macon, it’s the whole month of March that causes the problems.
And there will be no collapse.

Despite being forced out of her Montford storefront in March 2025, followed by another displacement from her commissary kitchen space due to fire in March 2026, Macon’s Beyond Amazing Donuts strives on.

Moving into April, Macon has found a new home at the Carolina Commercial Kitchen in east Charlotte, a space from which she’ll continue creating inventive pastry offerings to be sold at farmers markets and pop-ups around the city this spring.

In June, she’ll join the grand opening of Sparkhouse Coffee, the new venture from Do Greater Charlotte, a nonprofit founded by William McNeely to empower young creatives in the Queen City. Macon plans to have a presence in Sparkhouse’s Uptown space, selling doughnuts there on weekdays while continuing to show up to markets on the weekends.

Sparkhouse’s opening will mark Beyond Amazing’s first regular presence in a storefront since having to shut down the Montford spot in 2025. Uptown customers can get a taste of her specialty doughnuts during a Sparkhouse preview on Trade Street from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. on April 11.

She’s also scheduled to host a Bloom and Beyond pop-up at La Bodeguita in Camp North End on April 4, where she’ll offer up three spring menu items inspired by freshness and renewal: raspberry lemon, blueberry oat crumble, and a classic cinnamon roll.

Macon said her sense of resilience comes from her father, who in his sixties still owns a martial arts studio in Maryland.

“For all my life, I’ve seen my dad take his passion, take what he really cares about, and turn it into a business,” she said. “Not just a business, but something that gives to his community, something that I very openly see him enjoy.”

She’s taken her father’s example running an American Kenpo studio and applied it to her pastries.

“Not that my dad is always profitable, but he’s always committed to doing this thing that he loves, and his business has changed so many times over the years, but he just kept to it regardless of how big or small it has been,” she continued.

“I think that taught me a lot about hard work, a lot about resilience, a lot about how, if your dream changes, it’s fine. There is no one set rule or accomplishment or anything that can define what you’re doing for yourself and what you love, as long as you just keep moving forward and believing that everything is going to work out.”

It started with an Easy Bake Oven

Macon’s story didn’t start in the way one might expect.

“A lot of people, especially a lot of Southern people, they talk about how their mom or their grandma or someone had this gift and they could really cook and, you know, maybe there were recipes passed down. That’s not really my story,” she explained with a laugh.

Macon was raised by her grandmother in Thomasville, a small town south of the Triad area, when her military mother was stationed in South Korea. Living alongside her two sisters, Macon said she always had the biggest appetite, so her grandma bought her an Easy-Bake Oven just to get her out of the way.

“I was the one constantly eating, always in the refrigerator, always in the cabinets, and it just got to a point where my grandma was like, ‘Alright, child, I’m tired of cooking for you. You’re going to get in here and learn how to make stuff on your own.’”

She started with multiple Easy-Bake Ovens before she was eventually allowed to experiment in the kitchen with her grandmother’s supervision. After learning the ropes with Toll House cookies and boxes of Betty Crocker’s baked goods, she began watching Food Network and putting recipes together from scratch.

She continued to explore recipes throughout her childhood, but it wasn’t until her senior year at Thomasville High School that she began to consider a career in the culinary arts.

She remembers a student from Johnson & Wales University (JWU) in Charlotte visited her class to do a demonstration, teaching Macon and her classmates how to make an apple crisp. Macon was immediately inspired.

“She was a young Black lady, so I was really excited to see her specifically because I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s a Black woman coming from a culinary institute.’ So I was super stoked.”

Macon grilled the guest with questions about her experience at JWU and became “enamored” by what she shared about her experience. By the time she left school that day, Macon had made up her mind to attend Johnson and Wales’ Charlotte campus.

Though she had experience cooking a wide variety of recipes throughout her childhood, a passing comment from the visiting student at Thomasville High helped steer her to focus on pastries.

“When I met that young lady, she had mentioned a meat-cutting class, and I was like, ‘Ew, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be in a class in a cooler and we have to chop up all of these random animals. I just cannot do that,’” she recalled. “So I was like, well, going back to my fondness for cakes and cookies and things, I can just do baking and pastry and maybe that’ll work out.”

Since then, things have worked out, but not without struggle.

From a doughnut truck to a star-studded kitchen

Macon’s first job in the pastry space was as the first employee of Sugar Donuts, the first doughnut-focused food truck in the city. She helped the owner develop the menu and the recipes. Through that experience, the earliest ideas for Beyond Amazing Donuts were born.

“I was like, ‘Oh, this is it for me. Like, I love doing this,’” she recalled. “I loved the process. I loved going back into my notes from school and kind of figuring out how to tweak the dough. And I just knew during that experience that I wanted to do it for myself.”

She continued to develop her skills through a stint with Joe’s Doughs, where she was given more freedom to experiment with flavors. Then in March 2020, she landed a job as the pastry chef at Leah & Louise, Chef Greg Collier’s anticipated new restaurant inside Camp North End.

Days after a soft opening that saw food writers and influencers raving about the menu, on March 17, COVID-19 restrictions forced the restaurant to close before it could actually open.
Beware the ides of March…

Leah & Louise pivoted to carryout. Macon was tasked with creating a pastry box for curbside customers.

“Every month for a while, I offered a pastry box and I took that opportunity to continue to practice my recipe,” she said. “Like, I would do one doughnut, a couple of cookies, maybe a slice of cake and whatever other confection, but I always made sure to do a doughnut.”

Read more: Leah & Louise, Unwind Tea & Coffee Open During Turbulent Times (2020)

In a kitchen that included the James Beard-nominated Collier, Justin Hazelton (now owner of Lorem Ipsum) as bar manager, Tchnavia “Tché” Carter (Community Matters Cafe) as sous chef, and Oscar Johnson (co-founder of Jimmy Pearls), the pressure was on to create at a higher level.

“It was challenging,” Macon said of her time there, “but I think it was the challenge I needed to kind of expand my own skill set, because people think, like, ‘Oh, doughnuts are so easy.’ But I think that my doughnuts are kind of unique in the sense that I don’t just stick with traditional flavors.”

Collier said Macon was a critical part of building the original program at the acclaimed restaurant.

“A lot of times I would come with ideas and concepts, and Jasmine had the ability to translate those ideas into recipes and finished products that made sense. She helped shape that early pastry identity in a real way,” Collier told Queen City Nerve.

“At the same time, she was very clear early on that she wanted to do her own doughnut concept,” he continued. “We started supporting that through pop-ups at Leah & Louise and every time we did them, people responded. They sold out, and what stood out was that she was bringing more thought, more technique and more creativity to the flavors of doughnuts.”

Some of Macon’s creations from Leah & Louise, such as the Black Garlic Everything Donut, remain staples at Beyond Amazing Donuts today.

Beyond Amazing on her own

About a year and a half into her time at Leah & Louise, Macon began doing pop-ups on the side, selling doughnuts at HEX Coffee on Saturdays with Collier’s blessing.

Throughout that time, she regularly solicited feedback from customers, not only on favorite flavors but on their willingness to support a standalone business if she were to launch one. The response was always positive, which led to her opening her first storefront in summer 2023.

Though she was forced to shut the doors there two years later when production numbers didn’t match the projections, her products have remained a hit at farmers markets in Uptown, South End, University City and Matthews, where she regularly sets up.

While creating a new menu each month, Macon always keeps six staples on the menu: raspberry sprinkle, brown butter with sorghum caramel, the Black Garlic Everything, vanilla, the Old Fashion (glazed sour cream cake), and chocolate caramel cookie.

Working on Collier’s suggestion, the Black Garlic Everything was created in partnership with Johnson, who continues to supply the furikake topping.

The brown butter with sorghum caramel flavor is an ode to Macon’s grandmother, who enjoyed butter and molasses smeared on white bread as her favorite snack. It remains the top-selling item at Beyond Amazing Donuts.

Read more: How Larry Swayne’s Wingzza Mambo Sauce Solidified a DC Staple in Charlotte

Along with the April 4 pop-up at La Bodeguita, Macon is also offering an Easter box of four flavors designed to capture the warmth and indulgence of spring: carrot cake roll, key lime pie, raspberry lemon, and blueberry oat crumble.

Though preorders ended on March 31, Macon said there could be extras on the morning of the pick-up, at Enderly Coffee on Tuckaseegee Road on Easter Sunday from 9-11 a.m.

Beyond that, she’s focused on joining Sparkhouse Coffee for its grand opening on Juneteenth weekend. We spoke to her shortly after touring the facility for the first time in March and she was excited about how it will turn out.

“It’s going to be amazing,” she said of the project. “It’s a lot bigger than I thought it was, so I’m excited to see the events and how it’s activated.”

There’s another partnership she will be announcing soon that promises to make 2026 an even bigger year for Beyond Amazing Donuts, proving that Macon’s resilience will pay off as she continues to cultivate a loyal following of doughnut lovers by simply doing the thing she loves most.

And with that pesky month of March out of the way, it’s all downhill from here.

Follow Beyond Amazing Donuts on Instagram for updates on pop-ups, farmers markets and other news about the business.