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Delicious Sweets bakeshop

"When I was a child, my mom kept me in the kitchen with her. She wasn’t a baker, she was a cook. She had me mixing things and stirring things and getting this, and getting that, and she slowly started teaching me some of her recipes.

How I started baking cakes was by accident. She was supposed to bake a cake for my great uncle's funeral and ended up having to work. I volunteered, 'Mom, I'll do it!'

She was like, 'What?'

I said, 'Yeah, I’ll follow the directions.' So I did it. I was 11 years old and I made a German chocolate cake. That was the very first cake I made.

When I made the cake and took it to my cousin's house, everybody was like, who made this cake? At 11 years old, I'm like, I made the cake! I made the cake! You know, everybody was excited! They can't believe I made this cake. That's kind of how I started. After that, my family would ask, can you make me a cake? I was making everybody cakes for free. I mean, at 11 years old, you're feeling great, because everybody's going crazy for your cakes.

I found my love of baking in responses that I would get from people. That's really what it is for me. People order stuff and they are so happy and excited.
After the German chocolate cake, I wanted to make caramel cake. My grandmother, she made this delicious caramel cake and I wanted to know, so bad, how she made that frosting. So, she gave me her recipe.

I tried to do it, but it was an epic fail. My caramel, you could see through it like skim milk. I perfected that and I ended up really hitting it off with the caramel cakes.
I came to Saginaw in 2010 to attend Saginaw Valley for Social Work. While on a break at my parents' house in 2011, I put out a small flyer. I had sat in my dorm room and typed up Delicious Sweets, and they took the flyers to work. Not that I was naming the business delicious sweets just that my sweets are delicious, and here we are years later.

From that flyer, I got 27 orders. I was so happy and excited. So, I’m baking in my parents' home, in the kitchen. I watched my dad go to work, come home from work, and go back to work the next day. I was still in the kitchen, for like two days.

This got me thinking, I decided, I can figure this out.
 
If someone asked me if I could make a birthday cake, I would say, sure! That was in 2012 and ever since then, I got more orders and more people asking.
That's what helped me to expand. I wanted to learn how to do more, so that I could say yes and be confident. I'm completely self-taught, and honestly, I feel like it's a gift that I just didn't know I had. It came easy, even though I didn't know how to make a birthday cake. It didn't take forever for me to figure it out.

In 2015, I graduated and went to Bloomfield Hills to manage a living facility for older adults. Then I got tired of being in that area, so I applied here in Saginaw, and I became the supervisor for Brookdale senior living. But, even with the social work, I did cakes on the side.

My business continued to grow and grow. It got to the point where I'm a supervisor of 30 staff and I have opened a bakery and I cannot figure out how to do both. I’m baking before work, after work, and on the weekends. Until I wasn’t able to anymore, when I felt like I needed to quit my 9 to 5 job because I'm not giving it 100% anymore, because all I want to do is bake, talk to my customers and make them happy.

Even though I was afraid, I just felt like God was leading me and letting me know it was the right time. I literally woke up one day and thought I heard a scripture so clear, and it was like, God didn't give you the spirit of fear. That same day, I went and I put my two weeks in. I'm not going to lie. I was scared. I had just opened up here at the
SVRC Marketplace and I did it. It was the best decision I could have ever made."

- Cierra Warren, Delicious Sweets Bakeshop