Three springs

A quick blog on the last three years.

Three years ago today the first At Heart cake went out the door. A simple little two layer, six inch strawberry cake topped with strawberry jam. Flowers for cake deco weren’t in my orbit yet. I only had some strawberries not used for the jam, which I just laid atop the cake. A very humble beginning. Things seem to happen for this little bakery in the spring. Cake orders pick up for the year every March, after a slow winter. As soon as the temps outside start to rise and the hot pink azaleas pop up in garden beds and sidewalks again, my inbox fills up with people wanting cake decorated with flowers. I’m happy being Atlanta’s garden cake lady.

The first concha recipe (raspberry pistachio, still a fave) I published on my website went up four years ago in March 2021. A spring emergence after having spent all winter, that surreal, terrible winter of 2020, developing the concha recipe as a way to impress my grandfather, notorious in my family for his sweet tooth. Both conchas and self-publishing would lead to big things. I don’t think it’s just me being dramatic to say both changed my life.

Now it’s 2025 and this spring, right now, I’m wrapping up the cottage bakery era of At Heart for restaurant life. Today was supposed to be my first at Communidad—another spring emergence—but there’s construction delays and it’s not like there’s nothing to do. There’s this weekend’s cakes to mix, bake, cool, wrap and store in the freezer until Friday morning when I’ll make batches of buttercream. I still need to text my flower vendor to ask her about the florals this week. I have to eat lunch and still need to prep dinner as cakes come out of the oven. Bakery life happens concurrently with home life.

I return again and again to the accessibility offered with the pop up business model and its low barrier of entry. I don’t come from money. The idea of savings is laughable to me. But I can afford to run a bakery on (much) a smaller scale, popping up temporarily over the years anywhere willing to host me. Sometimes that meant just for an hour while I set up and then sold out in 45 minutes; other times it meant giving me weekly access to a vacant “coffee lab” in the back of a local coffee shop to sell conchas and cake slices.

Atlanta is a city with a rich and thriving pop up community, but it’s rich and thriving out of necessity. Beloved small businesses shutter all the time due to astronomical commercial rents. A symptom of a city, like many others, that prioritizes commercial real estate development over the longevity of small businesses. I want a small bakery, maybe one that started out as a pop up, in every neighborhood and don’t believe that’s a silly pipe dream.

The busyness of a bakery has been enmeshed in the goings on of my home for three years. Enmeshed in its truest sense: “as entangled; to catch or hold as if in a net” because that definition is true to how it’s felt. Slightly claustrophobic; confined; limited. Home can just be home again soon. Spring 2025–yet again a spring time emergence—is here and I’m ready to go outside with it.

The very first At Heart cake for a customer (2022); the most recent strawberry cake (2025).