New Bakery With Cake Puddings and Thick Cookies Opens in East Austin

This fall, a new bakery touting cookies, cakes, and puddings opened in East Austin. Pink Sugar is found at 2823 East Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Suite 105 within the Platform Apartments in the Chestnut neighborhood as of late October.

Pink Sugar serves up a bunch of sweet baked goods. There are the cake puddings, where the house-made puddings are studded with cake and Nilla wafer bits, in flavors like strawberry dulce de leche, banana cream, peach cobbler, and the winter seasonal red velvet cheesecake. Then there are tons of cookies, from the massive cookies dubbed THICC, white chocolate caramel, salted brown butter chocolate chip, and the Kitchen Sink (dark and semi-sweet chocolate, walnuts, pecans, and sprinkles). There are also cakes by the slices and non-sweets such as bacon-egg-cheese sandwiches and biscuits with dragonfruit/berry jams.

About ten years ago, owner Shelesa “Sugar” Tennon, born and raised in Austin, tried to make her mother a birthday cake. She followed a recipe she saw on a baking show, and it turned out to be a disaster: “The cake was still warm when I frosted it so much so that it slid off the plate and hit the ground,” she writes to Eater. Her mom still ate and praised the cake. After that, she taught herself how to bake. She started off by making cupcakes and evolved into baking custom cakes and the like as well as offering baking classes.

Through Pink Sugar, Tennon wants to work on mentoring aspiring young at-home bakers into growing their businesses as she did. The bakery also has a focus on being sustainable and reducing food waste.

She decided to go for her dream during the pandemic, raised funds via Kickstarter in 2021, and found the location courtesy of her bookkeeper who works nearby in 2022. She signed the lease that June. The neighborhood made appealed to her: “I just decided to be Black and participate in fixating myself and the business where Black and brown people have historically and systematically lived since the inception of this city,” she writes to Eater.

Pink Sugar’s hours are from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. and then 4 to 7 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Custom orders can be placed online.

Pink Sugar