Crave Sweets Bake Shop owner Lana Hickey provided edible brew — pastries made with beer — to the recent Science of Beer event at the Museum of Science & History (MoSH).
And she joked, “Okay. I’m coming for the trophy this year.”
MoSH special events coordinator John Mullikin told her Gus’s World Famous Fried Chicken came in number one at the event’s best food category for the past two years.
But not this year. Crave Sweets took the first place spot at the January 12th event.
“We did chocolate stout cake with rum butter cream and butterscotch beer brownies,” Hickey says. “We had people coming to our booth nonstop.”
Their molasses cookies were the only thing not made with beer. “We make our molasses cookies to be dipped in the beer.”
She was surprised at the response. Typically, “savory items,” not sweets, are paired with beer, she says.
Hickey knows a thing or two about sweets. She’s the owner of two locations of Crave Sweets Bake Shop: one at 11615 Hwy. 70 in Arlington, Tennessee, and the other at 1730 South Germantown Road, Suite 123, near Moondance Grill.
Hickey began cooking in her hometown of Sumner, Mississippi. “I did a lot of cooking in my teenage years for my siblings. My mom worked multiple jobs.”
Hickey learned a lot from her mother and her grandmother. “And the rest is pretty much self-taught. It was Southern style food. Your typical pinto beans and cornbread and meat and threes.”
But that’s not what sparked her interest in cooking. In high school, she took a class on photographing food. She thought, “People get paid to create plates like this?”
Students in the school’s home economics class provided some of the food. Hickey, who describes herself as “more of an artsy person,” says seeing the food with her artist’s eye enabled her, through “presentation and colors,” to “create art and put it on a plate.”
Before seeing the fancy plates of food, Hickey “didn’t know what fine dining looked like.”
Olive Garden was the closest she’d gotten to that type of food, she says.
Because of that class, Hickey enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts Atlanta, where she concentrated on French cuisine fine dining. “That’s actually my background. It wasn’t until after I graduated and got into the food industry that I started baking pastries.”
She made salads and desserts at the old Madison Hotel, now Hu. Hotel. “Our executive chef, Chris Windsor, had a list of items he would like for us to make, but he left it in our hands to come up with recipes. That kind of thing. So, I did get to be a little creative.”
One of her first original desserts was “bananas with white chocolate chips and caramel rolled up in a wonton wrapper, deep fried, and then rolled in cinnamon and sugar.”
Hickey stopped working at the hotel after she had her first child. But, when her daughter turned 3, Hickey returned to baking big time. “She got up on the counter. I’d Google a different recipe and we’d just kind of experiment on the weekend.
“I always cooked dinner every night for my family. When she and I would experiment, it would typically be baking. I jokingly told my husband, ‘I can’t get rusty. I have to stay on top of my skills ’cause I’m going to use them one day.’”
Her husband, Ben Hickey, is a chef who worked at the old Jarrett’s restaurant before becoming executive chef at Amerigo Italian Restaurant.
Lana made birthday cakes and pastries for Facebook friends before she and her husband opened Crave Coffee Bar and Bistro eight years ago in Arlington, Tennessee. “I always wanted to open a restaurant and a coffee shop.”
They served sandwiches and soups made from scratch as well as baked items, including homemade cinnamon rolls, blueberry biscuits, and Lana’s popular “sausage cheddar muffins.”
She and her husband had a “huge following” at the restaurant, which they ran for eight years until closing it in October 2023.
In 2017, while they still owned the restaurant, Lana, who now had three children, decided to open a bakeshop. Running a bakeshop is easier than a restaurant, she says. “The hours are different. The holidays are different from a restaurant. I’m not there at night.”
She did the baking and her husband handled all the administrative duties, including finances and payroll.
Lana opened the Germantown location in October 2023. “We do all types of gourmet desserts, wedding cakes, custom cakes.”
Many of their recipes come from recipe books that belonged to Lana’s grandmother as well as grandmothers of her general managers.
Their pastry menu changes every day, but they do keep “staple items,” including their “cheesecake brownies” and “strawberry crunch bars.”
Their cheesecakes also are “never changing,” Lana says. “We recently started supplying those to Moondance. We do turtle cheesecake, red velvet, and traditional strawberry.”
And, “to be a little bit different,” she does a Biscoff or cookie butter cheesecake.
“The newest thing we have done is our banana pudding cake. Holy cow. It’s out of this world. It’s a banana butter cake with fresh bananas, white chocolate buttercream, and banana pudding filling. And then it has your vanilla wafer cookie crumble around the top and bottom edge.”
As for future plans, Hickey wants to open a third bakeshop location. She’s currently looking at Olive Branch, Mississippi, and Millington, Tennessee.
And opening another restaurant isn’t out of the question. It would be “fine dining French cuisine.”
And, yes, Hickey does take photos of her baked creations.
But, she adds, “It goes out our door so fast I mostly keep up with my photography skills with my children.”