A Sweet Treat: The Cake Lady Opens East Lyme Store

By Lymes Patch Local Editor Jayne Keedle

A lot of people in East Lyme know Charlene Lindquist. She graduated from East Lyme High School, raised her kids in East Lyme, and worked at the Village Bake Shop in Niantic. 

Throughout Southeastern Connecticut, however, Lindquist is famous as The Cake Lady. 

Lindquist first launched The Cake Lady as a home-based enterprise in 2001 and built her business on cupcakes. Initially, Lindquist did all the baking herself at home. But though it helped that she has a commercial kitchen in her house, her business license prohibited her from selling from her home, so she had to deliver all the cakes herself. 

"It was like catering. Everything for the first two years was delivered. I loaded my station wagon and I would be on the road about 23 hours, I’d go to Pawcatuck and Essex and every place in between," she said. "After two years, it got to the point I couldn’t keep up any more."

Lindquist needed a place where people could come to pick up the cakes but she started off small, with a tiny storefront on Williams Street in New London. 

"People could come and pick up their cakes, but everything was still done out of my home," she said. That worked for about three years, until her business grew to the point where she was bringing three carloads of cakes to the shop every day. Once again, she said, she could no longer keep up with the demand.   

The move to her current location at 256 South Frontage Road in New London finally gave her the opportunity to bake onsite and hire employees to help. 

"Now we’ve been here for seven years and I finally got a walk-in [refrigerator] which enabled me to satellite out to East Lyme," said Lindquist. "We could have done it before but we didn’t have the refrigeration to handle even more. Now we have a refrigerator that’s the size of a bedroom!"    
 
Opening a satellite store at 190 Flanders Road in East Lyme, Lindquist said, "was a no-brainer for me." 

"We love the location. We love East Lyme," said Lindquist. "It’s really been our customers there that have pushed us [to open the East Lyme store]  and we hear the same thing from our customers in Mystic."     

There's no actual baking done at the East Lyme store, but each day it's stocked with freshly baked cupcakes—at least 15 different varieties from chocolate peanut butter to red velvet cream cheese—and cookies too. The Cake Lady's signature cup cake is the pistachio almond custard. 

Lindquist said she hopes to open a satellite store in Mystic at some point too, but she wants to make sure East Lyme gets off the ground first. The store, which opened about three weeks ago, still has no sign so it's a little hard to find tucked away next to Wild Birds Unlimited. The signage should be coming soon, Lindquist said.

As the East Lyme store doesn't have refrigeration at this point, Lindquist can't keep her custom cakes on site yet. People who want a speciality cake still have to call the New London store to place the order and pick it up there too. 

Another important thing to know about the new store is that transactions are cash or check only. Lindquist said the credit card fees have risen to the point that they are cost prohibitive and she didn't want to raise her prices. The cupcakes sell for $2 each and, if you buy five, you get one free. 

Store hours in East Lyme are Tuesday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. To special order a cake, call the New London store at (860) 437-8666.
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