There’s someone new “waking and baking” in Buckley’s Mr. Bill’s Plaza.

Christina King’s work day starts around 2 a.m., when she’s gathering all her ingredients. A couple hours later, she’s rolling out her dough. And by six, when the neon “open” sign is switched on at Bonnie’s Buns, she’s pulling out the morning’s last batches of cinnamon rolls from the over to hand them off to her husband Kenny to frost.

The bakery moved into its latest location last December; it originally started out at the Buckley Kitchen (a rental kitchen center) in 2021 before moving to Puyallup, but something called the Kings back to the city that sits above the fog and below the snow to start their first brick-and-mortar shop.

As Kenny put it, “Buckley chose us.”

Christina grew up baking with her mother, Bonnie Jacobs; making Christmas cinnamon rolls was especially memorable.

But it wasn’t until Christina reached her 40s, with her toddler twins, that Bonnie sat her daughter down to really teach her the tricks of the trade.

“She said, ‘you need to learn how to do this’,” Christina, recalled. “She walked me through it for months. It taught me patience. It taught me that I could do something; there was more to this than just dough.”

Baking turned into a passion for Christina — and then a lifeline, when she was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2019.

Making cinnamon rolls while receiving cancer treatment was difficult, not least because Christina forgot how to walk and needed to re-learn everything from a wheelchair. But as she regained the use of her legs, Christina realized she wanted to do more than just bake for her family, and even before she could walk around again, Bonnie’s Buns was up and running, selling its goods at local farmers markets.

“I don’t look back at that as a sad time anymore,” she said in a recent interview. “I look at it and say it was a stepping stone for all of us.”

The transition to her new Buckley kitchen wasn’t the smoothest. When she first moved in, she was “freaking out” because her dough wasn’t coming out right, since she traded out her five Kitchen Aid mixers for her one commercial-grade one.

But now she believes she’s got the kinks worked out.

“It’s like my Mom said, ‘It’s an understanding with the dough’,” she said.

Christina is proud that all her goods are based on her mother’s work; the O.G. cinnamon roll and the dinner rolls are direct descendants of Bonnie’s home-made recipes, while some of the more imaginative concoctions — the blackberry swirl, Reese’s peanut butter swirl, and banana bread roll — started out as cobblers, cookies, or bread before Christina modified their form.

After her first morning bakes are finished, Christina watches her shelves like a hawk for the moment she thinks she’s got to get back into the kitchen and make more rolls before she runs out.

“It’s got to be fresh,” she said. “I want that first bite that y’all have to speak: ‘I am home.’”

Bonnie’s Buns is located at 29297 Hwy 410 E. Suite D, Buckley, and is open Tuesdays through Saturdays from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. For more information on the menu, to buy online or to request information about wholesale options, head to bonniesbuns.com.

Christina King putting the drizzle on a fresh pan of banana bread cinnamon rolls at 6 a.m. Photo by Ray Miller-Still