Double Cake: Baking Studio – A place where people come and try something new, something classic and something unexpected.

I grew up in Juncos, Puerto Rico, and I always loved art as a child. I studied to be an art teacher and after graduating I was lucky enough to quickly find job in a wonderful specialized art school in Humacao, Puerto Rico.

But after just one year working there our country was in serious financial debt and the governor decided to make giant cuts in the public sector. Being relatively new I lost my dream job and was left with nothing else to do. At the same time both of my parents decided to move to the States in hopes of finding a better life. I didn’t want to leave my country so while I figured something out I decided to take some baking classes to keep myself busy. I had always being inspired by popular cake tv shows and thought this might be something fun.

My husband and I (who is a graphic designer and my original assistant) started making 3D cakes for different friend activities. Our cakes stood out because we combined our knowledge in art and my new found love for baking so after posting some of our work online we started getting request and little by little, 5 years later, our business had grown to the limits of our kitchen. There literally was no more space left for even one more cake pan so we decided to take our business out of our home and to the next level. After all this, today I’m the proud owner of Double Cake: Baking Studio…but more about that on our business description.

My personal story kind of got mixed with the business a little bit but its just hard not to talk about myself without talking about Double Cake. Like I said before Double Cake was the hobby that turned into a job and then turned into a business.

Originally we only made custom cakes for every occasion but when we realized we were getting too many orders and our kitchen was overwhelmed by it, then we started to look to expand our business by turning it into a full blown bakery. We spent around a year looking for the perfect place and after a couple of bad experiences and dead ends, we found this almost abandoned space on Loíza street which was a real fixer upper but it just felt right.

The Loíza street in Santurce was a street that much like us was also growing and being populated by many young and hip businesses who like us wanted to create something fresh and new. So after many months of planning, painting, drilling, building and doing many business things, we were learning on the fly, we finally came up with Double Cake: Baking Studio. I knew I couldn’t limit my business to just making cakes, and I didn’t want to be like most bakeries here in Puerto Rico that take on many aspects of cafeterias to survive and I also didn’t want to have just a simple cupcake shop. I wanted to create a space to create all kinds of pastries and baked goods. A place where people could come and try something new, something classic and something unexpected.

Lucky for me on the way we found such a talented and creative group of individuals that love baking as much as I do and have transformed Double Cake to the point some people don’t even know we started out as a custom cake business. I’m really proud of what this business has become, and the way it has been received by our customers is something I never expected.

We were recently approached with a very good offer to expand our sales at a new mall that’s opening in Old San Juan. This new concept would be called Double Cake: Sweet Market and it would feature most of our beloved products that we currently sell at our current Baking Studio plus some exclusive content made just for this new space.

We would still be doing all the baking at our current store so we can maintain quality control but this new space would serve as an extra point of sale for our products and help us grow. The deposit on this new space is $5000 and they expect to finish all building by January 2016, so if all goes well we expect to be opening this new space by February/March.