May 24, 2022

A longtime pastry chef is moving into her own storefront and expanding the business with her husband to include an event space with catering.

Chef April Austin has been sharing kitchen space with Chef Jeni & Co., but “her business has grown and mine is growing, and we’re just on top of each other now,” Austin said. Jeni Thomas’ catering company has expanded to include Dinner Birdie, a prepared-meal service.

Austin and her husband, Nick Rerick, are renovating space in a retail center at 3210 E. 10th St., east of Hy-Vee. She’ll continue to operate Cakes & Confections by Chef April, and they’ll tweak the name to incorporate the new event side.

“We’re hoping to do birthday parties, rehearsal dinners, anniversaries, baby showers, pretty much anything,” she said. “The east side is struggling for a little small event area. People are like, ‘Where can we go?’”

The space will seat up to about 50 guests, and the look will be “a little modern, very black and white and wood tones,” Austin said. “Very pretty and elegant, but not too much where people feel uncomfortable.”

The color scheme will make it easy for people to incorporate their own pops of color, she said.

Austin and Rerick met when both were working at Callaways, the former event center and restaurant along Prairie Green Golf Course on East 69th Street that’s now Look’s Marketplace. Rerick was a chef then and now works as a food supervisor for Avera Behavioral Health.

“He’ll stay working there until we get up and rolling. He helps sometimes when I’m swamped, and we worked together at Callaways all those years, so it just seems normal,” she said of working together again.

They’re working on an event menu, which also will include all the desserts that she has been making for  two decades.

“We’ll do consultations, and they can pick off the menu, or we can customize it for them,” she said of clients for the event space.

The business model for Cakes & Confections by Chef April has been custom orders, and Austin also makes desserts for restaurants. Eventually, the new space will include a bakery case for walk-in business, she said.

She started at Callaways when it opened, initially cooking in the gourmet food store and moving over to the event center to make desserts. She asked if she could start making wedding cakes and built a reputation for her elegant designs.

When the event center closed, she moved to the restaurant to make desserts. After Callaways finally shut its doors in 2019, people were still reaching out to her to make cakes, so she started her own business.

She loves doing birthday cakes for kids.

“My favorite thing is when they order kids cakes and they bring them in and their faces show how excited they are to see it.”

She plans to keep taking orders “right up to move time,” which she hopes is “around the beginning of July.”

They’re giving themselves a cushion for any construction delays and booking the first events in August.