In South Alabama, Dean Jacobs has been baking cakes from another time and won’t stop now.
There is little decoration on the outside, no shutters, no shrubs.
It’s plain in just about every way.
Credit: Robbie Caponetto
It’s the highest compliment Dean Jacobs hears.
And her secret ingredient is the grandmothers themselves.
“It’s the only thing we’ve got going for us,” Jacobs said recently.
Credit: Robbie Caponetto
“People know a real person makes every cake.
it’s possible for you to taste it.”
The Magic Of The 7-Layer Cake
And customers agree.
Credit: Robbie Caponetto
From her nondescript building, Jacobs ships hundreds of cakes a day to grocery stores throughout the Southeast.
She’s selling layers of place and time.
She says she never expected any of this and still struggles to understand it.
Credit: Robbie Caponetto
Dean’s Cake Customers
This smells like my grandmother’s kitchen.
The History Of Dean’s Cake House
Thispart of Alabamaisn’t a very romantic place.
There are no no oak-lined shores.
It’s an old railroad town where people work hard, and that suits Dean Jacobs.
After the Second World War, her father came home to sharecrop on a farm outside Andalusia.
As a child, she hardly ever tasted cake.
She’s 84 years old now and still remembers the scent of cinnamon and sugar.
For years, she worked the cash register, until a spot opened up in the deli.
“Dean, they were selling cakes in grocery stores,” she told her.
“You should sell your sock-it-to-me cake.”
Starting A Business
She made one cake and then another.
Then she sold the grocery store stock she’d been saving for decades andat age 60started a new business.
Why seven layers, though?
“That’s how tall my cake dome was,” Jacobs says, laughing.
“That’s all I could fit.”
They think we’re here to bake a few cookies and go home.
But cakes are hard work."
The bakery’s most glamorous job is icing the cakes.
Much like potters throwing porcelain, they construct twirling, towering cakes, layer after layer.
Jacobs calls the process “our commotion.”
She says corporate types have come through over the years, advising how to make the commotion more efficient.
It didn’t work, she says.
Keeping A Tradition Alive
Someone else suggested that Jacobs replace the ladies with an automated assembly line.
She could make a lot more cakesand money.
“And it would taste like a machine!”
It’s the peril of hiring a staff of women who have baked for generations of children and grandchildren.
“No, I need a lot of girls,” she finally says.
But not as long as I’m alive."
And then she, a woman well set in her ways, gets back to work.
Update
Wilma Dean Jacobs has died at the age of 89 on Tuesday June 25, 2024.
