Ford’s mother and grandmother raised him on homestyle baking, sowing in him the roots of good food, he said. Now he and his wife run Tell Me Something Sweet along Plano’s 15th Street.
The backstory
At around 20 years old, Ford asked his mother to make him a pound cake, and to his surprise she told him to get baking. So, with his grandmother guiding over his shoulder, Ford whipped it up.
“Thirty pounds later, I was hooked,” he said.
Ford then moved to baking other pastries for friends and family over the years, and by 2020, he and his wife formulated the idea for the Plano bakery, he said. They started selling at farmers markets and trade shows in 2021 before moving to the Plano brick-and-mortar store the following year.
Why it's special
The bakery sells a slew of cakes and pastries from yellow cake with chocolate frosting to strawberry pound cake to a layered chocolate cake with dark chocolate icing, Ford said. It also offers peach cobbler, pecan bars and other Southern-style sweets.
The bakery’s homemade goods take people back into their memories. A woman once burst into tears after eating the sweet potato pie saying, "My mother died in 2013, and this is the first thing I’ve had that tastes like hers," Ford said.
“When you're raised on the taste, you can’t fake it,” he said.
