Renowned Harlem bakery launches GoFundMe to stay in business

HARLEM, Manhattan (PIX11) — It's become a Harlem institution with international recognition. Now, though, the award-winning, family-owned bakery Make My Cake is saying that it needs the help of the community in order to keep serving the community. It's launched a GoFundMe to help it to carry out its mission, which goes beyond just making cakes, pies, and puddings.

The business began as a catering operation in which the mother of Make My Cake's owner, Aliyyah Baylor, used well-kept family secret recipes to make and sell sought-after dessert items.

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"She started this business 50 years ago in a fifth-floor walkup in the Bronx," Baylor said in an interview at the Harlem bakehouse on Thursday morning.

As the popularity of the products grew, the family took the business operating from their Bronx apartment to a bigger kitchen in an apartment they got in Harlem. From there, they were able to open up a storefront in the historic neighborhood and were eventually able to make that into two shops, side-by-side.

That second store, a coffee shop called I Like It Black, is right next door to the bakery.

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It's all on Harlem's main street, 125th Street. As Baylor pointed out, getting the high-profile location where the store is located now has defied odds, especially as a small, Black-, and woman-owned business that opened during the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"These businesses still exist," said Baylor, "but they are not existing as much as big retailers, especially the ones you see [here] on 125th Street."

Overcoming barriers, including a gentrifying neighborhood, has not been easy and is getting tougher, Baylor said. The increasing obstacles, she said, prompted her to begin the GoFundMe campaign, which seeks to raise at least $50,000.

"It is essential that we continue our legacy," the business owner said, "and going beyond traditional ways of getting funding is something I had not experienced before."

Baylor explained that the GoFundMe campaign is meant to ensure that Small Business Administration loans that enabled her to open here can get paid down.

That would enable Make My Cake to keep employing people from the local community, while also winning more awards.

Customers on hand on Thursday, including Florianne Proeisy and Thibaut Parage, tourists visiting from France, said that the quality of the baked goods was remarkably high.

"The French croissant, very good," said Proeisy.

"Very good!" Parage emphasized. They said that it met their very high French standards.

Regular customers, like Babygirl Foster, a Harlem resident, said that Make My Cake is vital to the neighborhood and needs to stay.

"It's very important," Foster said, "because we like to support each other."

The GoFundMe, said Baylor, the bakery's owner, is a way for people to show support, in addition to patronizing the business.

The crowdsourcing effort, she said, is part of building the legacy of Make My Cake.

"Our story continues," Baylor said. "This is a chapter, and I have to be part of writing what's next."