Frost Bake Shop ready to ‘engineer cakes’

Small Business Spotlight for The Memphis Daily News

Sept. 2, 2013

Bill Kloos Jr. and his parents, Bill and Lynne, have opened Frost Bake Shop in the Laurelwood Shopping Center, where they will sell their line of “engineered cakes.”

(Photo: Daily News/Andrew J. Breig)

Frost Bake Shop ready to ‘engineer cakes’

All American Sweets was the confection of chef Bill Kloos Jr., who moved from St. Louis to Memphis to take over the operation of Yia-Yia’s Euro Café and later would go on to open Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse and Wine Bar.

His dreams, though, were bigger and sweeter, and once he convinced his parents, Bill and Lynne, to relocate from the Midwest to the Bluff City, the specialty dessert business was off and running.

Well, maybe not quite running.

“This really started in their apartment making a cake a day, or two cakes a day,” Kloos Jr. said. “Where now we’re making 75 to a hundred a day.”

And beginning earlier this month, there was a need to bake even more as the Kloos family opened Frost Bake Shop, the retail arm of All American Sweets. Located in Laurelwood Shopping Center, just down the walkway from another sweet Memphis institution, Dinstuhl’s Fine Candies, Frost sits in a corner bay recently vacated by clothier James Davis, which has hemmed in its total retail space.

A week before the grand opening, Frost’s 2,000-square-foot store was a tangle of conduit, extension cords and cabling as work was underway to ready the space, designed by Veronica Tansey of Fleming Associates Architects PC, for its big day.

Kloos takes pride in the business being family-owned, and the tradition of baking with family recipes and only from scratch with no commercial mixes. The menu has custom birthday, wedding, layer and seasonal cakes, along with cupcakes, pies, cheesecakes and cookies. A staff of 15 works the 5,000-square-foot All American Sweets baking facility in Bartlett, and Kloos said the biggest problem for them is a good one to have: “How do we make sure we make enough stuff to keep this place going?”

Product will be delivered daily to Frost for purchase, pickup for custom orders or eating in at the small seating space. A few items will be baked onsite and some light decorating and detail work will be done as well . . . (read more)