A middle-aged man in a black polo shirt approached Abby Jimenez at Nadia Cakes, the bakery she owns in Maple Grove, Minn.
“Excuse me,” he said, “can I get a picture with you? My wife loves your books.”
Jimenez, the author of seven popular romance novels — her latest, “Say You’ll Remember Me,” was a No. 1 best seller — was happy to oblige. The resulting photo, in which she smiled and her reader’s husband beamed in front of a neon “Treat Yourself” sign, captured the twin worlds Jimenez has built.
Cupcakes and rom-coms, it turns out, have a lot in common.
“They’re both pleasant ways to escape and fun to share,” Jimenez said during an interview at her shop in a sprawling mall. “Writing and baking are activities for introverts.”
Jimenez values quiet time, when she isn’t dabbling in reality TV — she won an episode on Season 4 of “Cupcake Wars” — and serving as a face of the modern romance genre (bodice-ripping is out, irreverent humor is in). Indeed Jimenez appeared slightly weary, having just completed an eight-city tour for “Say You’ll Remember Me,” which came out on April 1.
She held court at sold-out venues; she rolled with the requisite snafus, as when a smoke alarm went off during a 400-person event in Toronto and a gaggle of “ridiculously attractive” firefighters arrived, inspiring a viral video; now she had a wracking cough.
But Jimenez’s welcome was warm, and she had an appealing scrappiness. I barely had to ask a question; she’d told the story of her circuitous career path many times, but she still choked up at the hard parts.
Jimenez, 45, was a baker before she was a writer. And before that she worked fast food and retail, at Del Taco, Baskin Robbins, Subway, Express and, finally, New York & Company in Burbank, Calif.
She grew up in Washington, D.C. and just north of Los Angeles, raised by a single father. “I couldn’t go to college,” Jimenez said. “I had to work so I could afford to live, starting at 16.”
She met her husband when she was 21, had her first daughter at 24, then two more in quick succession. In 2007, while pregnant for the third time, she said, “I was being performance managed out of my job. It was clear and blatant sexism.”
Anxious about the family’s finances, Jimenez took a cake decorating class at Michael’s, the big-box craft store, hoping to make extra money from home. A few months later, with three kids still in diapers, she started Nadia Cakes (named for her middle daughter) out of her kitchen.
She set up a baby gate to contain her girls and a picnic table for extra counter space. She baked on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday; decorated cakes on Thursday and Friday; delivered them on Saturday and consulted with clients on Sunday.
One day a pregnant customer got locked in Jimenez’s bathroom (her husband had to remove the door from its hinges); another time, one of Jimenez’s daughters grabbed a fistful of a fully-assembled wedding cake. The family was living in Palmdale, Calif., in the middle of the desert, so temperatures in the kitchen reached triple digits in the summer. The electricity bill was astronomical. But Jimenez’s confections were selling like, well, hot cakes.
She and her husband decided to go all in on a bakery, maxing out credit cards and racking up $125,000 of debt in addition to the $18,000 they already owed. They poured their resources into a dilapidated former Juice It Up! location that had been vacant for two years.
“We were so broke, we didn’t have money to put change in the drawer,” she said. “It was this all-or-nothing moment. We were immediately embraced. The people that came to my house and held my baby while I filled out their order forms, they all supported me.”
In 2011, after a 23-state exploratory road trip, Jimenez and her family relocated to suburban Minneapolis, chosen for its four seasons and lack of cupcake shops. With their Palmdale location in the care of trusted employees, they opened Nadia Cakes in Maple Grove; then, a year later, another outpost in Woodbury, outside of St. Paul. Jimenez’s husband left his job at Room & Board to help run the bakeries, and Jimenez was ready to hang up her apron.
“I was burned out. I wanted to step back and raise my kids,” she said. She continued to write menus and social media posts for Nadia Cakes (she still does), which led to an internet frenzy over the Vageode cake. But Jimenez finally had some breathing room — and that’s when she rediscovered reading, including the Outlander series, “Divergent” and “The Hunger Games.”
On a camping trip, Jimenez told her daughters a story during a thunderstorm and they encouraged her to write it down. She later submitted her “very terrible Y.A. dystopian romance” to an agent, who declined to represent it but encouraged her to keep going.
She found her way to Critique Circle, an online community where members provide feedback on other writers’ work in exchange for credits to submit their own.
“It was like a creative writing boot camp,” Jimenez said. “I would not be where I am if not for Critique Circle. Full stop, period.”
She declined a deal for a series of bakery romances and also scored poorly in competition for a Romance Writers of America award that recognizes outstanding manuscripts. (One has the sense that Jimenez not only learns from her mistakes but remembers a slight.)
Following the advice of her circle of advisers, she scrapped the dystopian romance and ramped up the witty banter. Forever, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, finally offered her a book deal.
“The Friend Zone,” her 2019 debut, was a USA Today best seller, but some online reviewers objected to its depiction of infertility. “I got a lot of kickback,” Jimenez said. “I learned a lot of lessons. One is, you need to do your due diligence. And you need sensitivity readers.”
Subsequent books have included trigger warnings. In “Say You’ll Remember Me,” for instance, Jimenez alerts readers to material involving advanced dementia, a cheating spouse and child abuse. She writes, “There’s a scene where a dog is in peril. (The dog doesn’t die. The main character’s dog will NEVER die.)”
In the past six years, Jimenez’s books have sold 1.6 million print copies and 1.5 million electronic copies, according to Circana Bookscan. (Forever declined to disclose sales figures.) These are impressive figures no matter how you slice them, even more so for a self-taught author who has three bakeries, three daughters, four dogs and no office. She’s working on this; her house is being renovated to include a designated work space.
Leah Hultenschmidt, Jimenez’s editor, said, “I love working with Abby because she’s an entrepreneur. She has gumption and hustle. She’s goal-oriented.”
Not surprisingly, Jimenez’s books have spurred interest in Nadia Cakes, which she name drops in every novel. Fans make pilgrimages from out of state, according to Lauren Potter, who has worked for the bakery for 10 years and manages both Minnesota locations.
There are lines out the door when a new novel comes out, Potter said.
“Abby’s fans are calm, cool and collected until they get their hands on the book,” she added. “Then they’re like, ‘Get me out of this store, I have to go read.’”
Not only is Nadia Cakes the rare bakery that sells fiction, it also offers cupcakes tie-ins. The Say You’ll Remember Me is a blue guava cupcake topped with pink cream cheese frosting and a tiny red heart. (As a general rule, I avoid turquoise baked goods, but I can vouch for the Pretty in Pink, which had a subtle citrus finish.)
Jimenez has already written her eighth book and was well into her ninth by mid-May. She can churn out a complete manuscript in a matter of months; that’s not the hard part of her job. The challenge is keeping it fresh, not burning out on writing as she did with baking.
“I have not stopped working a day in my life for 30 years,” Jimenez said. “I’m always working.”
She’s proud of what she’s been able to provide for her daughters — “When it’s their turn to have kids, I’ll be able to help them to stock their fridge” — but she said, tearing up, “I wish I would have held them more. I look back at their baby pictures and it’s like, God, I was so tired. There’s entire years I don’t remember because I was so stressed.”
Five days after our conversation, Jimenez announced on social media that she’s taking a three month break to “be still for a while.”
Will Jimenez return from this hiatus with a new venture? Possibly. But, given the pride on her face when she spoke of her novels, it seems unlikely she’ll move on from them. Nor has she abandoned Nadia Cakes; she’s just found a way to fold it into her latest chapter.
“I wish I could hop back in the brain of 16-year-old me for 30 seconds just to say, You’re going to have all these things and do all these things,” Jimenez said. “But first, I’d whisper, It’s going to be OK.”
Elisabeth Egan is a writer and editor at the Times Book Review. She has worked in the world of publishing for 30 years.
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