For Jim Peace, carrot cakes and local law enforcement go hand in hand.
First came the carrot cakes. As a young man working at the MCV blood bank in the 1970s, Peace had his first taste of carrot cake when his boss Nancy brought one to the staff’s monthly potluck meals.He was immediately fixated on getting her secret recipe.
“I loved it so much I had to develop a strategy,” he says from his house overlooking the Corrotoman River. “I needed to be able to have that cake again anytime I wanted it for the rest of my life.” It only took a few months of begging before Nancy walked by his desk and without so much as saying a word, dropped the recipe in front of him.
The only tiny little problem was that he had zero baking experience. What he did have was a degree in science and two years of medical school, so he not only understood what baking powder and soda did for a cake, he could write the scientific reaction. As he puts it, “The science kicked in.”
As for Nancy’s detailed recipe, he made it his own. “I guy’d the recipe up,” he laughs, meaning that rather than sifting ingredients, he dumped them into a bowl. And folding in 8 eggs one at a time? “Nah, I just throw in all 8 at once.” Before long, he was “cranking out” carrot cakes on a regular basis.
By the early 1990s, Peace was a member of the Richmond Police Department’s bike patrol and often stopped at the Robin Inn for meals. He was such a regular there that he wound up being invited to their employee holiday party and naturally, he brought a carrot cake. The owner wasn’t just impressed, he was blown away. Peace recalls him saying, “Jimmy, let’s talk business.”
Before long, carrot cakes made by local law enforcement were showing up on all kinds of restaurant menus around Richmond and the bike cop spent a lot of his off hours baking them.
“I thought they were so good, I just wanted people to eat them,” he explains. “But they’re a pain in the neck to make. You have to grind carrots and chop nuts and it would take me over four hours to make four cakes.” Labor intensity aside, baking the cakes was a creative outlet for him—“I would paint if I could draw”—that helped balance out the stresses of his experiences on the force.
A funny thing happened, though. When he retired from the force in 2011, he stopped making the cakes and finally had the time to devote to boating. A devoted sailor since the first time he’d gone out on a neighbor’s Minifish in the early 1970s, he turned his attention to power boating. And as soon as he did, his wife Christie—they’d married the year before he retired—began talking about finding a river cottage, sending him on scouting expeditions while she was at work.
When he walked into the little house on the Corrotoman River, Peace knew right away he’d found exactly what she wanted: a place she could put her stamp on. “It was a neglected and unoccupied foreclosure,” he recalls, a far cry from the airy and charming place in which he now sits. “I called her immediately and said we found your cottage.”
Once they took ownership of the cottage, he made his first project dealing with an abandoned boat on the broken boat lift and, with no idea what to do with it, called Lancaster Sheriff Ronnie Crockett to check on the legality of moving it. During the conversation, Peace inquired if the Lancaster sheriff’s department was hiring, only to be told that they would be.
By the time Peace and his wife had finished renovating the house, he figured enough time had passed to call Crockett back. “He told me to come down so he could take a look at me and next thing I knew, he was taking me over to the Clerk of the Circuit Court and having me sworn in right there.” Hired as a part-time bailiff, Peace was back in the game, doing court security and transporting prisoners.
“All because of a broken boat on a broken boat lift,” he chuckles. “It’s a little like apples and oranges, but it’s not as different as you’d think it is from policing in Richmond. It’s not that we don’t have serious crime here, just that the people who do them are less ruthless than in Richmond. The difference here is how the community treats you. It’s easier to protect and serve people who like you.”
Currently, he works for Sheriff Patrick McCranie, who says Peace takes on some of the toughest people they deal with. “Jim was a hostage negotiator with Richmond Police Department and he puts those skills to good use when we deal with individuals who don’t want to comply,” McCranie says. “Somehow, Jim develops a relationship with these people and gets them to listen and, many times, turn themselves in if they’re wanted. One time, he went on a call and somehow ended up feeding a baby goat. It’s all about enthusiasm and he brings that to the job each and every day.”
After he was elected, Sheriff McCranie took Peace out of the courtroom and assigned him as a full time road deputy, taking 911 calls, doing radar and making traffic stops, or as he puts it, doing what rural cops do. “It’s rewarding catching bad guys,” he says. And almost immediately, he began baking carrot cakes again.
“It’s not like I think I’m stressed out and I need to bake a cake, I just start baking. Somehow it balances me out.” Lately, it’s become a shared activity with his wife Christie, whom he says excels at icing the cakes far faster than he ever could.
“I spent a lot of time thinking whyI do this and I decided it was an outlet for me and now, it’s a thing I do with Christie,” he says. “Baking with her helps balance out what I see in terms of the awful things people do to each other.”
These days, they take their carrot cakes to holiday events and dinner parties and Peace says they’ve yet to have so much as a slice to bring home afterward. Not surprisingly, he’s been asked countless times if they’ll end up doing this as a business once he retires for the second time. And they might, in between sailing and power boating on the river, of course.
“I always thought it was a good business idea,” he says with a grin. “We might start cranking out cakes for sale. It could happen.”
