When she was 14, Whitney Ware was in tears over her birthday cake.
She had spent hours building a three-tier cake — zebra-print and ambitious for a teenager still learning the art of baking. By morning, it had started to drip.
Ware was convinced no one would want to eat it.
Everybody loved it.
After she posted the cake on Facebook, messages started pouring in with custom cake requests.
“I was so hard on myself, forgetting that I was 14,” Ware recalled.
Sixteen years after she first started baking, those early cakes have grown into a business with nearly 60,000 Instagram followers, viral cookie pies and two storefronts.
On Aug. 22, the recently turned 30-year-old entrepreneur cut the ribbon on Cake Your Way’s second location, bringing the Vaughan bakery she opened eight years ago to College Street in downtown Toronto.
“It took me eight years to get a second store,” Ware said. “I feel like a lot of people would have given up before then. Even myself, I wanted to give up.”
From birthday cakes to a storefront
Ware’s first cakes trace back to 2010, when the Los Angeles Lakers won the NBA Championship. A basketball fan, she made a Lakers-themed cake for a friend’s birthday to commemorate the win.
By high school, Ware was making custom cakes for classmates to earn money. Creating an Instagram account helped turn the hobby into a business.
Her sister passed along what she learned in baking classes. They started the business together, but when her sister took a step back, Ware went all in.
At 21, an opportunity came through one of her mother’s friends, who was leaving a commercial space in Vaughan and asked whether Ware wanted to take it over.
Ware said yes, despite underestimating the cost. She acquired the space in 2017 and opened to the public in February 2018.
“I was so humbled by how much it cost. I literally remember having 40 cents in my bank account,” she said. “I couldn’t even do my nails for the grand opening. My friend sent me the money.”
For young entrepreneurs, access to funding can be a major barrier, said Tamara Chanoine of Futurpreneur Canada, a national non-profit that provides loans and mentorship to entrepreneurs aged 18 to 39 and offers a Black Entrepreneur Startup Program.
Before opening a first location, Chanoine said entrepreneurs need to understand their credit, cash flow, bookkeeping and the added costs of operating a storefront.
She said community support and a loyal customer base can also be vital when scaling a business.
Finding an audience online
Ware’s network has been one of her biggest strengths as she has grown the business.
Social media, once a platform Ware kept separate from her personal identity, has become a major marketing tool for Cake Your Way.
For years, people did not know Ware was the face behind the bakery. But after she began posting frequently, people gravitated towards her personality, work ethic and behind-the-scenes baking content.
“I think without social media, we definitely wouldn’t be as far as we are,” she said. “I tell everyone who will listen, post your content because you don’t know who’s watching.”
Chanoine said a strong community and loyal customer base can help businesses grow.
For Black entrepreneurs, she said representation can also show others what is possible.
“Black entrepreneurs are creating jobs, they’re inspiring other entrepreneurs and demonstrating what is possible for the next generation,” she said.
When Ware started her business, she said she had to figure much of it out on her own.
“When I was building everything that I was building, I wasn’t doing it by looking at a blueprint. There wasn’t the representation, so it was a lot of figuring it out, questions going unanswered, because I had no one to ask.”
Now, she said, that has changed.
“Now, with so many entrepreneurs, so many people that look like me, doing great things, the representation is there. The visibility is there, it doesn’t seem so far out of reach.”
Ware hopes her own journey can help make entrepreneurship feel possible for others.
“If I can show people like, yeah, a girl from Rexdale, a girl with not a lot of resources can figure it out, there’s no reason why you can’t either. It’s not going to be easy, but it’s possible.”
Ware’s hustle remains central to how she runs Cake Your Way. But the path hasn’t always been linear.
Earlier this year, Ware said she was close to “hanging up” her apron. Custom cakes alone were no longer generating enough revenue to grow as customers became more cautious about spending.
Then she found inspiration in cookie pies, a popular dessert in the U.K.: thick cookies filled with a fudge-like centre and different baking mix-ins.
She created her own version and posted a video on social media in February that went viral. Since introducing cookie pies, Cake Your Way has sold over 8,000 slices.
“Cookie pies have changed my life,” she said. “I would not be in a second store without cookie pies.”
The cookie-pie breakthrough
This year, Ware held pop-ups at Bramalea City Centre in Brampton, Square One in Mississauga and Scarborough Town Centre. Across the three pop-ups, Cake Your Way sold over 1,500 slices of cookie pie.
The Scarborough pop-up brought some of the biggest demand yet. Over three days, Cake Your Way sold out five hours before closing — despite making over 500 pounds of cookie dough and restocking twice — while Ware and her roughly nine-person team continued running the Vaughan location and fulfilling custom orders.
“We were at our wits’ end,” she said. “We were producing as much as we could physically produce.”
Still, Ware said the chaos keeps her motivated.
“I really do believe pressure makes diamonds,” she said.
Standing in her second location, Ware sees the moment as proof of how far passion, risk and persistence have taken her.
“All those years of consistently posting, fine tuning my work, putting myself out there, I was able to create this moment that I’m in now,” she said.
After 16 years, her advice to the 14-year-old kid who once cried over a zebra birthday cake remains simple: “Just keep going.”
