People often tell Dean Jacobs that she smells like cake. The lingering sweetness of her bakery surrounds her and the women she employs at Dean’s Cake House in Andalusia – but they’re so used to it that they hardly notice the smell anymore after a long day in the kitchen.
When Dean was 60 years old, she went into business for herself, opening the original location of her bakery in 1994, in an out-of-the-way spot on Highway 55. Her thought, at first, was, “Ain’t nobody gonna come down here just to buy a cake,” she says. “But they did. Word of mouth got it going.”
Customers couldn’t get enough of her birthday cakes, cinnamon rolls and doughnuts. She also made custom wedding cakes. Five years later, she moved to her current location on Snowden Road, closer to town. The building previously housed an upholstery shop. “There was not a spot that didn’t have remnants, inside and out,” she says with a laugh.
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