A proven, community- minded bakery has opened in Wimberley. Cake Llama, owned by Alyssa Young, opened last weekend in the Mountain Plaza shopping area, offering everything from wedding packages, corporate snacks and catering, to bread and other delicious treats.
“Half of my items are vegan,” said Young, who stood next to a large tray of beautifully shaped loaves, “and I give away bread to anyone who needs it. It’s our philosophy.”
– Alyssa Young Far from an empty claim, the bakery not only creates high-end bakery products, it gives away free bread and creates sandwich kits, no questions asked, to volunteers who want to disperse them in their community.
Cake Llama’s free bread project, “Loaves,” was initiated in 2020 and has evolved into sandwich kits that include bread, peanut butter, jellies and jams, sometimes honey and a message of hope for people experiencing food insecurity. Volunteers have regularly delivered sandwich kits in Austin, San Antonio and to the small towns in between.
“We seem to be in a time where we have forgotten what it’s like to struggle and be down on our luck,” writes Young on her website, cakellama. com. “Our lifelong mission is to cultivate compassion and to inspire a grassroots effort in communities. Small acts of kindness add up and take very little time out of a day. Time is a gift, so use some of it to give goodness to others because hope is contagious.”
A message certainly embraced by Wimberley, Young also champions the recovery process by providing a meeting space for recovering addicts, by extending employment to people transitioning from halfway houses, and by actively supporting the JED Foundation, a mental health non-profit that helps teens grow into adulthood, by offering education, training and tools. Coffee in the bakery’s public space is free, as is the wifi and the comfy furniture. Young is no stranger to hard work and persistence. In a CNN interview she related how she began her wedding cake business in San Antonio in 2019. When the COVID shutdown hit, she saved her business by experimenting. She wholesaled baked goods to coffee shops, provided catering for touring bands and began baking egg-free vegan items.
Neither is she a stranger to struggling. The former Executive Pastry Chef also talked in a “Voyage Austin” magazine article about the “incredible amounts of sexual harassment and pay inequality” she endured working in the food and beverage industry. Although she worked in several bakeries, including her family’s, ran a pastry kitchen in a downtown Austin restaurant and built a dessert catering department for a luxury hotel chain, she did not attend culinary school. “I reached a breaking point over the education bias and the egos of the culinary industry,” she said, and turned her side projects into Cake Llama.
“Cake Llama,” she said, “stands for equality, second chances, community support and really really good cake.”
Located at 14500 RR12 in the Mountain Plaza shopping area, Cake Llama is open Monday through Saturday from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m.
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