By Ashley McLeod, Senior staff writer
Jun 24, 2016, 15:04
COLONIAL HEIGHTS – While many in the city are sleeping, one business owner in Colonial Heights is up and getting down to business in order to serve the city quality, homemade goods.
“We get here at 4 a.m. and start baking,” said Ashley Moore, owner of the new bakery on the Boulevard, Cakes and Moore.
The new bakery opened earlier this month and provides homemade goods fresh every day.
Moore, who is from Dinwiddie, began her dream to open a bakery simply by making cakes for family and friends out of her home. From word of mouth, more and more people were coming to Moore for her baking skills.
“It just kept going, so I decided to pursue it and go to school for it,” Moore notes.
Previous to opening her bakery, Moore worked at Priority Toyota for eight years, alongside her parents. She had planned to become a teacher but said she continued to hit roadblocks on that path. With baking, it was the complete opposite.
So Moore enrolled at the pastry arts school at the Culinard, the Culinary Institute of Virginia College, located in Midlothian, graduating in June of 2015. At the school, she said that everything came easily to her.
“I had raw talent from the beginning. I was self-taught completely until I went to school,” she recalled. “I knew how to do most of it; it was just learning different techniques. I was able to get more classically trained, and not just on my own.”
After finishing school, Moore went back to work at Priority, but continued baking.
More and more people wanted her baked goods, and the word was spreading, so Moore decided to turn her baking into a full-time job.
Moore said she was looking for a place in Dinwiddie but wasn’t finding anywhere to open other than building a new store, which was not in her budget.
One day, while working at Priority, an opportunity appeared to Moore.
“I happened to have a craving for Little Caesar’s pizza, which is right there. We had been looking for places because I was getting too busy to keep doing it at the house,” said Moore. “So I happened to look up and there was a sign on the building beside Little Ceasars.”
Moore called the number for the open storefront, and it happened to be a friend of her family, who then told her about a larger space available just a few doors down.
“It was perfect,” she said enthusiastically.
Along with her family, Moore remodeled the building, putting in new flooring, a bathroom, a new counter, as well as repainting and decorating.
Being from the country, Moore wanted her bakery to have a rustic feel to it, bringing a little bit of the country into the city.
The wood used to build the counter, which sits in the bakery, is actually from a packhouse from the Civil War era. A family friend lives on the property where the packhouse is located at Five Forks in Dinwiddie. Part of the structure was fallen, so the owners allowed Moore to take some of the wood to use in her bakery.
The store opened with a soft opening on June 11, right in time for graduations and the beginning of wedding season, and Moore says that they’ve stayed busy since.
“We’ve had a ton of custom orders,” explains the new business owner. “We’ve booked four weddings, and have done countless other birthday cakes, cupcakes orders for birthdays, big themed cakes and stuff like that.”
Everything sold inside the bakery is made daily.
When she arrives at the bakery at 4 a.m., Moore said she starts her day by baking donuts, a tastier alternative than frying them. She also makes muffins and other pastries, and makes fresh yeast rolls every day for their lunch sandwiches, which include tuna and chicken salad, and will soon have egg salad as well. Moore said the tuna salad is ‘her Meemaws recipe,’ and her mother helps with the chicken salad as well.
“Everything is made in house, with family recipes,” Moore says proudly.
Her cupcake flavors include Smores, Oreo, strawberry, and of course vanilla and chocolate, with flavors changing often depending on demand.
Moore said eventually she’d like to have her own freestanding location, but in the meantime, she just hopes to stay busy and keep baking, something she never thought would become her career.
“It’s really surreal that this all happened in a year,” said Moore.
Cakes and Moore is located at 2112 Boulevard in Colonial Heights and is open Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Saturday from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m.
