Wear stretchy pants: A Will and A Whisk is the best excuse on the island to ruin your diet

This is a woman with serious credentials putting real love into small batches, and you can taste the difference immediately.”

Dylan Bailey

A Will and A Whisk Bakery
1853 South 8th Street
Fernandina Beach, FL 32034
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A Will and A Whisk Bakery has been open on South Eighth Street since November, and I have driven past it approximately four hundred times. It sits across from Taco Bell in the same building as K and Co Salon, which means if you've done literally anything on that stretch of road in the past eight months, you've seen it too. In July, I finally stopped. I would like to formally apologize to myself for the eight months I waited.

First, the backstory, because it's a good one. The owner, Danielle, is not new to this. She's a Rosen College of Hospitality graduate who once worked as a pastry chef at Cinderella's Royal Table, the restaurant inside the actual castle at Walt Disney World, cranking out thousands of desserts a day. She later spent five years at a pastry shop in New Hampshire, working her way up to lead cake designer. She planned to open her own bakery up there in 2019, but life intervened: her son Will arrived prematurely at the end of that year, and she stepped back to stay home with him. In 2024, the family moved to Fernandina to be closer to relatives; she poured coffee at the island Starbucks for a while, and then the bakery finally happened. A Will and A Whisk. Her son's name is Will. I'll let you do the math on that one, and if it doesn't warm you up before you've eaten anything, the pastry case will finish the job.

The store itself is tiny. The majority of the square footage belongs to the kitchen, where you can watch the baking happen while you browse, which I genuinely love. There's no seating, the retail area is snug, and none of that matters. It's a cute space, pink inside, with a little play area if you've got a kid in tow, and even the bathroom is nicely decorated. You can feel the care in every corner. Fair warning on logistics: they're only open Thursday through Saturday, 8:30 in the morning until 2, and the parking situation out front is not winning any awards. Plan accordingly.

I went in around 1:15 on a Saturday, 45 minutes before close, and while the shelves had clearly seen action, there was still plenty to choose from. The menu rotates constantly. Cakes, cupcakes, pastries, cookies, brownies, pies, whole cheesecakes, a seasonal menu, plus custom orders and even private decorating classes. You genuinely never know what you're going to find, which is half the fun. With a recommendation from the very sweet woman behind the counter (no pun intended), I walked out with a tiramisu cinnamon roll, banana pudding, a slice of Oreo cheesecake, and something called cake scraps. My wallet and my waistline were both screaming at me to stop. I did not stop.

Let's start with the cake scraps, because the concept alone won me over. Instead of throwing out the extra cake trimmed off during decorating, they pile it into a container with icing and, in my case, Oreo pieces, and sell it cheap. It's brilliant, it's delicious, and with a hot cup of coffee it might be the best low-stakes dessert purchase on the island. The banana pudding came highly recommended and earned it. The flavor is pronounced all the way through, no weak spots, no filler bites. That ended up being the theme of the entire haul: everything, from the frosting to the fillings, actually tastes like something. Every spoonful I shoveled in delivered.

The Oreo cheesecake deserves its own paragraph. You can buy cheesecakes whole or by the slice, and at about $7 the slice is absolutely the move unless you have tremendous self-control, which I do not. I don't think I've ever audibly reacted to a piece of cheesecake before. This one got a sound out of me. Perfectly creamy, loaded with chocolate and Oreo pieces, sitting on some kind of chocolate crust. I would buy a whole one, but I know exactly what would happen to it, and I'm not ready to see that version of myself.

And then the tiramisu cinnamon roll, the thing I'm still thinking about. They offer a regular cinnamon roll, but tiramisu is one of my all-time favorite desserts and I'm a coffee addict, so this was never really a decision. The tiramisu sits on top, and as you pull the roll apart, every piece comes away with that strong coffee flavor and creamy tiramisu richness, almost like you're having a cup of coffee built directly into the pastry. It was beautiful, it was eye-catching, and it was gone in minutes. I ate everything I bought that day, every last piece, and I regret nothing.

Here's what it comes down to. This is not a chain. This is a woman with serious credentials putting real love into small batches, and you can taste the difference immediately. You are not getting this from a Starbucks or a Panera, and I say that knowing Danielle used to work at one. So do yourself a favor. Wear the stretchy pants, brave the parking, get there before the case empties out, and prepare to gorge yourself on some of the best desserts on the island. I'll be back for another slice of that cheesecake. Possibly two. I've stopped making promises to myself.