05/06/2026
Hi everyone, it’s Kay from Kay’s Kakes. Today is my 25th birthday.
I wanted to come on here and thank you all for the past 6 years of support. This is something I’ve always known I wanted to do, and I feel so lucky to have my family behind me as we opened this bakery.
It all started with my Nana. When my mom was growing up, she baked everything from scratch. She’s no longer here to see the bakery, but I was lucky enough to go through her recipe book filled with handwritten notes and recipes she collected over the years.
Because of her, my mom baked and cooked a lot while I was growing up. Between the two of them (and my uncle), I learned so much about baking from scratch. Some of my favorite memories are baking cookies with them during the holidays. That’s something we’ve carried into our business. Everything we make is homemade from our cookie dough to our buttercream. Many of our recipes are my Nana’s, with some of my own additions over time.
When I was in 3rd grade, we did a project about who we are, the people in our lives, and what we hoped to achieve in the future. I still have the drawing where I wrote “Kayla’s Bakery.” I remember even in 5th grade, when they asked what we wanted to be in the yearbook, I didn’t know I could put baker as an option at the time. I think I ended up just putting teacher.
Over the years, I would go on YouTube and look up different recipes to try. I remember watching Cupcake Jemma to learn how to ice cupcakes better and what tips she used. She has a bakery in London and would post all different tips and tricks online.
I started posting everything I made on the Instagram and pages that are now our official Kays Kakes pages. If you scroll all the way back, you’ll see some of the first cakes and desserts I ever tried making.
Then when I got to middle school, I took the cake decorating courses that Michael’s Craft Store offered at the time. It was definitely a period of trial and error. Luckily, my mom was very supportive in my endeavors. She would stay up late helping me make little modeling chocolate figures for cakes, help me find all the different supplies I needed, and was genuinely as supportive as she could be. I don’t think I would’ve been able to do any of this without her.
When I got to high school, I kept practicing cake decorating and baking different recipes. We constantly had sweets in the house from both my mom and me baking. I soon started making cakes and cupcakes for friends, family, and church dinners.
Something a lot of people don’t know is that I make my own birthday cake every year. There have only been one or two years when I wasn’t able to. It’s something I really enjoy doing. I started back in 2015 and still look forward to it every year.
Once I graduated high school in 2019, we had already begun planning to open the bakery. We opened our doors on January 22nd, 2020. It has definitely been a learning curve, but I wouldn’t change it for the world.
I’m so thankful to be surrounded by such a supportive family and friends who have helped throughout the last few years. I especially want to thank my grandfather for everything he’s done and for working at the shop in his free time. He started by working the front counter and making sugar cookies, and now he’s one of my main taste testers and constantly helps me experiment in the kitchen. I bet he never would’ve imagined he’d be working at our family bakery at 83.
Thank you so much for all of your support since opening. I can’t wait to see what the future holds. 💗
