Our story
How a shop is built around a name.
My mother-in-law's name was Gwen. She was the first to say it out loud: you should go to pastry school. Eighteen years married to her son, three daughters in, twenty-nine years of his Navy service behind us — and there she was, saying the thing I had been circling around for a decade.
I had wanted my own cake shop for a long time. Long enough that the wanting had its own shape, its own weight, a place I'd kept it folded up in the back of the closet. The Chef's Academy program came first, then the slow accumulation of seventeen years of buttercream and fondant and the particular muscle memory of leveling a cake layer with a serrated knife.
The shop opened in June of 2020. If you remember what June of 2020 looked like, you'll understand that this was, by every reasonable measure, the wrong month to open anything. I opened anyway. Faith is sometimes just the willingness to do the thing on the wrong day.
Gwen did not live to see the shop. The shop is named for her.
What we do here is custom — wedding cakes, birthday cakes, the cake for the day your daughter becomes a nurse, the cake for the dog's tenth, the cake that looks like a TikTok joke nobody outside the family will understand. Twenty-seven flavors of cake. Eleven fillings. Decorated sugar cookies by the three-dozen. A wall of candy that has, somehow, grown to fifty-five varieties — with a sign above it that reads, in case anyone is unclear, do not lick the walls.
I bake with my husband Michael, who retired from the Navy and walked straight into the kitchen to help me. I bake with our three daughters underfoot when they're home. I bake on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday from ten to five, on Saturday from nine to noon, and I rest on the days the Lord meant me to rest.
Creating custom tiers of joy. It started as a tagline. It turned out to be the whole point.
