Alexia Arthur was always artistic in the kitchen. Even as a child.
“I would make homemade apple pie, but not really apple pie,” she says. “But I would imagine it was apple pie.” It might have actually been “a piece of bread with oranges on it.”
Arthur, 19, is now the owner of Alexia’s Cheesecakes, an online bakery. Instead of using bread, she makes real cheesecakes and adds a variety of ingredients on top.
Her grandmother, Debbie Arthur, taught her how to bake, says Alexia, who is from Paragould, Arkansas. “I grew up on a farm, so I would help her make homemade butter and all that fun stuff.”
Debbie, who used to own an Italian restaurant in Paragould, mostly made Italian food. “My grandmother also used to make homemade focaccia every morning.”
Her grandmother got into cheesecakes because she “just wanted to bake a cheesecake.”
Alexia helped bake cheesecakes with her grandmother for fundraisers at her father’s church. “People started asking, ‘Hey, can we order one?’ Even when we were not doing the fundraisers.”
In 2011, her grandmother opened her She Bakes Cheesecakes business. “Every time she had an order, we would tag-team on baking.”
In 2016, her grandmother turned her cheesecake business over to Alexia. “She gave me her blessing to have the business.”
Alexia kept her grandmother’s customers, but “did my own thing … I just modernized it. I created a Facebook page, an Instagram account. I tried to reach people in those ways.” Her grandmother used to “have flyers that she’d leave at local stores or restaurants in Paragould.
“I still use her recipes. I just add my own little thing to it just to make it more mine. I like to add my input. Like flavors, I think I have 20 to 25 flavors. I started adding lavender, candies, stuff she never used.”
Alexia’s most popular cheesecake is The New York, which is “the one everybody gets, the plain one, but it has lemon zest and orange zest in it.” It also includes five packages of cream cheese instead of the usual four. “I think it’s richer and heavier.”
The Turtle Cheesecake, which features pecans, chocolate, and caramel on top, is a customer favorite. The Red Velvet Cheesecake is another hit. It’s “the basic cheesecake, the original, and then I add red velvet cake batter to the mix.”
The secret to making a great cheesecake is “just not to over-whip it. Cheesecake is supposed to be light and fluffy.”
Alexia used to over-whip her cheesecakes as a child. “’Cause I just loved using a hand mixer, loved to touch all the buttons. So I would have air bubbles in them. Sometimes I would have to make another batch. It would be too far gone. There would be so many air bubbles, it would almost look like cheese when it was baked.”
Alexia, who now lives in Millington, makes her cakes on weekends because she works a full-time job at Nothing Bundt Cakes.
She wants to expand her business. “I want to open up a cheesecake cafe with coffee. That’s the goal.”
Meanwhile, she is always experimenting with different ideas. Her “oddest” cheesecake is the Confetti, which is made with vanilla cake batter with sprinkles inside of it.
She’s working on a Fruity Pebbles cereal idea. “I think I would probably crush the cereal and put it in a crust, put it in the batter, and have it on top.”
Alexia’s go-to cheesecake is her Chocolate Cheese cheesecake. It’s basically the “classic chocolate cheesecake,” but, she says, “We add chocolate. We melt chocolate down and put it in the batter. And when we decorate it, we smother it with chocolate. So it’s like a heart attack in each bite.”
To order, go to Alexia’s Cheesecakes on Facebook or Instagram.