Sweet Cakes 4 U transitions to home-based bakery in Buda

BUDA — Customers of the beloved Sweet Cakes 4 U are in for a sweet surprise now that the co-owners, and mother-and-daughter duo, Dolores and Victoria Diaz have reopened the bakery — but this time at home.

Sweet Cakes 4 U opened in 2013 along Main Street at the Buda Mill & Grain Co. Dolores’ main reason for opening the business, alongside her passion for baking, was to spend time with her two daughters.

“Her main goal was to have us there all the time with her and she really did. The school bus dropped us off at the front of the shop on Main Street,” Victoria said.

During the spring of 2023, the Diaz family had to make the difficult decision to close the storefront right before its 10-year anniversary. Over the years, the bakery became more popular and saw more people wanting to buy products — however, staffing issues and rising costs due to inflation started to surface.

“For about a year, we had been mostly struggling with being able to find staff to work for us and also, we had to purchase an insane amount of goods to keep the place running. Everything was just super high; the prices were really high. We were traveling back and forth from north Austin [and] San Antonio trying to get products because my mom would only put the best product in her cakes,” Victoria said. “It all became too much … Her dream was to have a cake shop where a few years ago, you were able to go inside and actually see us cut the cake, like the slice from the cake and during COVID, we had to completely do away with that because it just wasn't efficient at the time. And then we didn't have people sitting inside because we had pretty much outgrown that space we were in. It's very small. We had the counter pushed up all the way to the front.”

The storefront was closed for almost a full year before the Diaz family thought about reopening in some capacity. Initially, following the closure, people asked if the family was going to do home pick-ups, however, Dolores was adamant on closing that chapter of her life, her daughter explained.

“[It] was a little interesting to me, I didn't quite understand that because her product is amazing and I think she has a lot of potential. But I went ahead and I agreed with her because I'm not going to disagree with my mom. So, I agreed with her, we closed the shop,” Victoria said. “Back in October, she called me to the house and asked me if I wanted to go back into business with her. I wasn't working at the time so I had an opening. I told her yes, she told me her plan and I was like, ‘Yeah, let's do it.’”

On March 15, 2024, Sweet Cakes 4 U began to take orders as a home-based bakery. Because of the Texas Cottage Food Law, which prohibits home bakers from selling products that need to be refrigerated, Dolores and Victoria had to modify their menu, but they still stick to their traditional, family recipes.

Currently, they sell eight-inch square dinner cakes in weekly flavors of double-chocolate, sweet vanilla, vanilla with chocolate and chocolate with vanilla, as well as rotating flavors of red velvet, pineapple upside down and strawberry buttercream. Other treats include lemon blueberry coffee cakes, s’mores bars, blondie bars, chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal raisin cookies, sugar cookies, cherry almond crumb cake, peanut butter chocolate chip cookie bars and Mexican wedding cookies.

Victoria said that she has enjoyed moving to a home-based business from finding peace working at her mom’s house for eight hours, to designing the porch for customers to pick up their products and finding additional time to do custom packaging and labeling.

And she stated that they have been pleasantly surprised with the positive feedback from the community.

“We didn't expect this amount of love and our community welcoming us back. It’s been absolutely insane. We get a lot of messages like, everyone's really excited to have us back, even though we don’t have what we used to have, but that they're still willing to support us in our new endeavors, which is always great to hear,” Victoria said. “And when it comes to the orders, I'm literally getting like 50 orders in, I would say, 15 to 20 minutes … There's a really large amount of orders coming in by the minute and I never expected that. At the shop, we used to get maybe six orders a week, like six cake orders a week, so it was never really a high volume for orders that you could place ahead. This is definitely new to see exactly how many people are willing to place the order ahead and come and pick up at our house.”

One of the challenges that Sweet Cakes 4 U has been facing is running out of inventory fast, which has prevented loyal customers from being able to place an order. The business was initially accepting orders through Facebook and Instagram messages, but that quickly became too much, so there is now a Google Form for customers to submit their orders.

Victoria announced on Thursday, March 28 via Facebook that order forms will now be released at two different times. For pickups on Fridays, the order form will be available at 11 a.m. on Mondays and Saturday’s order form will be available at 6 p.m. on Mondays in order to accommodate those who work.

To stay up-to-date on Sweet Cakes 4 U’s endeavors, visit www.facebook.com/sweetcakes4ubuda or www.instagram.com/sweetcakes4ubudatx.