When Keisha Jackson isn’t baking and lavishly decorating cakes, she’s driving her 72-foot-long tractor trailer.
“I’m a trucker,” she says. “I’m owner/operator. I drive a semi. I drive a Freightliner.”
She’s also the owner of Tasty Pastry. She bakes cakes, cookies, and other items in her Cordova home.
Jackson, 35, who is married and the mother of four children, packs a lot into her day. On a recent Monday, she baked and decorated a 12-inch “number” cake for a sweet 16 birthday party and then made salmon lasagna for the family dinner before she left home at 9 p.m. to drive to Olive Branch, Mississippi, to pick up her truck and then head to West Memphis, Arkansas. “I run trailers from Memphis to West Memphis. The rail yard. Drop off one and pick up another. And I do that four times [a night].”
She finished about 7 a.m. Tuesday. She then returned home, cooked breakfast for her husband, showered, and went to bed. Growing up in Memphis, Jackson didn’t like to cook. “Because I’m the only girl. I have three brothers. So, I was a ‘little boy’ running around with them. We wrestled a lot. We watched wrestling on TV.”
She also liked to draw “little people.” She drew “little girls and boys. Mostly girls ’cause I would change their hairstyles.”
Jackson, who wanted to be a tattoo artist, drew tattoos on her arm with gel pens when she was in middle school. She also charged 25 cents to draw tattoos on other children’s arms.
Jackson got serious about cooking when she met her future husband. She already had one child and he had two. “I went from just being a mother of one to three overnight. With a live-in boyfriend, I had to learn how to cook.”
So, she says,“I started making meals that my mom made for us as a kid.”
Jackson began baking two years ago, after she had another baby. Since she was home every day, she decided to start baking and decorating cupcakes as a hobby. She bought a decorating kit on Amazon.
She was asked if she sold her cakes after she posted photos of her first elaborately decorated batch of “red roses with green leaves” cupcakes on Nextdoor. The cake she baked for that woman led to more cake and baked goods commissions.
Jackson, who is known for her over-the-top colorfully decorated cakes, says a “divorce cake” was the “most outlandish” cake she ever made. A woman had requested a two-tier teal-and-pink cake to celebrate the occasion. Jackson ordered a cake topper of “a woman spanking the man” as one of the decorations.
“She loved it. And she ordered a dozen cupcakes to go with it. She wanted little penises on the cupcakes. Oddly, they have a penis mold. So, I guess her husband was a dick.”
Jackson baked one of her cakes for the recent New Beginnings and Friends of Horn Lake Animal Shelter Hollywood Gala at Theatre Memphis. She made a Hollywood-themed cake decorated with “a red carpet. There were mini dogs on the cake. And I had cameras, popcorn, and a director’s chair.”
The only cake request that stumped her was from a woman who wanted a cake shaped like a shoe. “She wanted a tennis shoe for her son. A Nike Jordan.”
Jackson doesn’t feel she’s adept enough at this point to work with fondant, which she’d need to “make shoe strings and the little badges on the shoe and the holes on the shoe.”
She’d “literally have to try to make an exact replica of a shoe” if she wanted the cake to fit her standards.
Jackson made her own cake for her 35th birthday. “I put mini liquor bottles all over it,” she says. And, she adds, “It was all white with clear and silver liquor bottles with silver sprinkles and silver roses.”
But, she says, “My husband drank one of the mini liquor bottles before I put it on my cake.”
Jackson, who requests seven days advance notice for cakes and other baked goods, can be contacted at 901tastypastry.com.
