Chesapeake baker gets $10,000 grant from Beyoncé, ending a year of setbacks and sadness

A Chesapeake baker got an email last week that few will ever receive: Beyoncé was going to give her business $10,000.

At first, she didn’t believe it.

“I was checking my business email, and it said, ‘You are a recipient,’” said Kimberly Outlaw, whose home bakery Sweet Cravings makes extravagant and lifelike creations shaped like boxing gloves or a newborn baby’s crib. “I had to read it four times, and I didn’t comprehend what I was reading. I screamed — I’m still in the same disbelief.”

Like many businesses, Outlaw’s bakery had been devastated by the pandemic. “I’m a celebration worker. We celebrate celebrations,” she said. And celebrations haven’t been happening with quite the same gusto since the coronavirus made large gatherings into a form of threat.

She’s had to rely on wholesaling to keep her business going, like the banana pudding and sweet potato cakes she sells at Norfolk sandwich spot Our People’s Soulful Seafood.

But last year, superstar Beyoncé Knowles announced that she would be working with the NAACP to create a fund called BeyGOOD to support Black-owned businesses hurt by the pandemic, which so far has given $10,000 grants to more than 250 small businesses.

Outlaw learned about the fund while flipping idly through TikTok, and figured she had nothing to lose by applying.

“They required that you submit a video telling your story,” she said. “And my submission was pictures of all of my cakes. I used some clips of TikToks I’d made. I told my story about how the pandemic had affected me.”

Outlaw’s cakes are impressive — creative and often photorealistic sculptures that might include a food-colored photo print of a recent graduate’s face, sporting a sugar-sculpted graduation cap that towers inches above the frosting. Maybe a willowy bride of Frankenstein. Or a football that looks like you should be able to throw it down the field.

Her cakes are sometimes so extravagant it doesn’t seem possible they’re cakes, as with a top-heavy 3D cake sculpture she made of her own daughter for her 12th birthday, walking and blowing bubblegum in the style of Japanese Chibi characters.

“That one took days,” said Outlaw. “You only make these memories once, so I try to go a bit over the top. I work all night for their birthdays just to see that smile in the morning. My eyes are dark circles, I’m looking terrible, but it’s worth it every time.”

Whatever pictures she sent, it was enough for Beyoncé's foundation. Sweet Cravings received a BeyGOOD business grant as part of the fourth round of small business recipients.

The money will mean a new lease on life for Outlaw’s 4-year-old business, which she runs out of her home as a solo baker. She said she and her husband, Herbert, have spent time in prayer about what they should do with the opportunity.

“It will be an expansion,” she said. “As for what that will look like, I’m not certain, I’m waiting to hear from God. We’re thinking of maybe opening a small storefront, maybe having a food truck to introduce Sweet Cravings on wheels. But until I know, I’ll stay put. I’m in the honeymoon phase, it’s so exciting and new. Once I properly digest it, we’ll come up with an amazing expansion plan.”

But the award was important to her for a different reason, says Outlaw. It put her legs back under her, and helped her get her creativity back after a year that had taken so much away.

In November, she lost her grandmother, Marjorie Turner, at the age of 100 — the mother to Outlaw’s aunt Patricia and her late uncle James “Skip” Turner, both members of the Norfolk 17, who endured countless episodes of abuse as the first African American students to integrate all-white schools in Norfolk.

Let's Eat

Weekly

We're serving up restaurant reviews and news about the local food scene every week.

Outlaw took the loss of her grandmother hard, a heartbreaking end to what had already been a year full of anxiety and setbacks. It was the email from Beyonce’s foundation on Jan. 13, she said, that gave her the “little jolt of joy” she needed to recover.

“I had no creativity whatsoever,” Outlaw said. “I took a hit to my spirit. Absolutely, out of everything I’ve been through with the business not doing as well, and having to take a break to deal with the loss of my beautiful grandmother, this is what I needed. It was like a sign: It’s time to get back up on the horse.”

She named her popular banana pudding, which she sells at Our People’s Soulful Seafood, after Grandma Marjorie, who loved the dessert. And she named her sweet potato cake after her paternal grandmother, Mattie, whom she’d lost the year before.

And she got back to baking. She says she keeps her family’s legacy in mind — the stories told to her by her aunt and uncle and grandmother.

“My aunt has shared so much with me. I don’t know how they did it. I’m proud that I graduated from Norview, one of the schools that was integrated,” said Outlaw. “My family has marked my name in history here. I’m Outlaw by marriage, but my middle name is Turner: It’s an honor. And hopefully I’ll carry on our family legacy, and inspire the next generation.”

Sweet Cravings bakery is a home bakery located in Chesapeake, and is reachable via its Facebook page, at facebook.com/sweetcravingsbakeryva.

Matthew Korfhage, 757-446-2318, matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.