Before Tammy Waxler could reach the dials on the oven, she found an outlet for her creativity. As a little girl growing up in Houston, Waxler would help her grandmother Alma and Aunt Theresa bake.

“My aunt made cakes, and as often as I could I was underneath her watching, seeing what she was doing and asking what I can do,” Waxler recalled. “She always made all of our birthday cakes and cakes for other people.”

Waxler brings that passion to Hill Country Cakery, where she still uses those same recipes and a lot of the same methods she learned early on. And it’s that same sense of family that shows in everything from the food to the atmosphere at her shop, she said, recalling her top childhood memories.

“Making Christmas cookies with my grandmother and then somehow my sister ended up with my grandmother’s set of cookie cutters when I’m the baker,” Waxler said.

In the mid-2000s Waxler had a career in accounting but was not keen on a desk job. Even though Waxler was in her early 20s at the time and had started a family, the decision to pursue opening a cakery was an easy one. She graduated from Houston’s Culinary Institute Lenôtre in 2007.

“You [have] got to follow your heart and not your mind all of the time,” Waxler said. “Me standing up all day, working with my hands and being creative is 100 times better than crunching numbers.”

Initially Hill Country Cakery was an at-home business, but all of that changed last year when another bakery called Sweet ATX closed, and Waxler was able to take over that space and open Hill Country Cakery in August.

Waxler finds that word-of-mouth advertising has been the most helpful. “I’ve had regular clients who called me to do their wedding cake and then their mom [will] call me later and have me do a shower cake and then the baby’s first birthday cake.”