A simple cake stand that Joanna and Chip Gaines received as a wedding present 22 years ago kickstarted a daily tradition that remains in place to this day.
Joanna Gaines shared on TODAY on Aug. 19 that anyone who visits the kitchen of the Magnolia co-founders can rest assured that one item will be there to nibble on every day.
“There’s a cake plate stand on the island that since I first got married — it was like the first year, I got it for a wedding gift, and it was empty,” she told Craig Melvin and Savannah Guthrie.
The tradition started when Chip and Joanna tied the knot in 2003.
“We had so many friends and family coming in, and I was like, ‘I need to start having something in there,’ so it was kind of a weird rule I made,” she said.
Gaines, 47, makes sure the plate has some kind of sweet treat on it every day — like the banana bread she made on the show.
“The rule is just kind of always have something on the cake plate stand for the family or for guests,” she said.
She acknowledged that as more of the couple’s five children go off to college, there is increasingly one person who enjoys the tasty treats she puts out.
“It’s really me now just eating the stuff, so that’s fun,” she said before laughing. “It’s now for me.”
Her home kitchen will also now be on display on the couple’s new show, “Magnolia Table: At the Farm.” She had previously used the kitchen at Magnolia’s separate Gristmill stone house as the setting for “Magnolia Table” on the Magnolia Network.
Gaines made sure to set some boundaries while using the kitchen in their home for the new show.
“I wanted to do something from home, but I kind of had a rule,” she said. “I was like, less than three people in the house and it has to be when the kids are at school so they don’t know what’s going on.”
“I didn’t want it to feel like a production,” she continued. “So I just wanted to be in that space, and we just kind of went on the fly, and it wasn’t really planned or produced.”
