09/01/2026
Sometimes you have to look backward to remember how far you’ve actually come.
I don’t usually share the hard parts while I’m standing in the middle of them. I’m much better at sharing the pretty cakes, the celebrations, the full cases and the finished product.
But right now, things are hard.
Owning a small business is hard. There are seasons when you feel incredibly proud of what you’ve built, and seasons when you wonder how much more you have in you. Lately, I’ve had more of those moments than I’d like to admit.
So tonight I went back through these pictures.
Before there was a bakery, there was an idea. Screenshots of spaces I loved. A floor plan. A vision of what this place could be. From the Pinterest inspo to the architectural renderings.
Then came construction.
Bare walls. Concrete floors. Lumber everywhere. A budget that somehow seemed to blow up a little more every week. Everything cost more than we thought it would. Every time we thought we were getting close, there seemed to be another expense, another requirement, another permit, another inspection, another hoop to jump through.
There were days when it felt like the permits would never end and the money would never stop going out.
And then came the flood.
Because apparently building a bakery from the ground up wasn’t quite enough of an adventure.
Water everywhere. Another mess to clean up. Another expense we hadn’t planned for. Another problem to solve. Another moment where quitting probably would have been easier.
But we kept going.
And eventually, those drawings became walls. The walls became a bakery. And that bakery became a place where people have celebrated birthdays, weddings, babies, graduations, first dates, last days, ordinary Tuesdays and some of the biggest moments of their lives.
We built something here.
I think I needed to see these pictures tonight because when you’re staring at the problem directly in front of you, it’s incredibly easy to forget all the problems behind you that you already survived.
I don’t know exactly what the next chapter looks like. I don’t have a perfectly packaged inspirational ending for this post.
Things are still hard.
But I do know the woman standing in the middle of those ripped-up floors, blown budgets, endless permits and flooded rooms had no idea what was waiting on the other side either.
She just kept going.
So that’s what I’m going to do.
One day, one cake, one problem, one little piece of hope at a time. 🤍
And maybe someday I’ll look back at this season the same way I’m looking at these pictures tonight and think:
Look how far we came- together.
