J. Rae’s, a family-owned bake shop with cozy, homemade desserts, opened March 19, 2021 in Dallas.
Since high school, new J. Rae’s owner Audrey Dixon has always wanted her own bakery.
Dixon’s aunt, Jana Rae Howell, launched the first two locations in Fort Worth and Wichita, Kansas. Since her first opening in 2008, Howell has sold the Fort Worth bakery to a different family in 2013 and sold the Wichita location to Dixon’s cousin.
Dixon said her cousin’s decision to keep the family business has been a great guide for her as she gears up to open her own bake shop in The Pavilion on Lovers Lane in Dallas.
“I call her nonstop,” Dixon says. “She’s been so helpful and it’s been really nice to have somebody that’s already opened it before tell you, ‘You definitely want to do this and you don’t want to do that.’”
Drawing from her own childhood experiences, Dixon hopes to deviate from prior J. Rae’s bakeries by adding her own recipes and personal twists to the menu.
“I added funfetti on there, because growing up my mom always made us a birthday cake every year no matter what,” Dixon says. “I’ve always loved funfetti and actually, a lot of places don’t sell it.”
Although this is the only addition Dixon has made so far, she hopes to add key lime pies and lemon squares in the summer, and snowball cookies in the winter, because they were desserts she remembers making with her family.
“Some of the seasonal things that we’ll do are definitely more nods to my personal upbringing,” Dixon says. “[Baking is] just something that’s very therapeutic for me, it always has been.”
Year-round menu offerings include customizable sugar cookies, cupcakes, cakeballs, cheesecakes, and classic cookie varieties. The spirit of J. Rae’s is to have a simple menu, but with items made carefully and made well.
With regards to J. Rae’s atmosphere, Dixon is hoping to make the new bakery a little more modern than past locations.
“The black and white stripes are kind of the signature J. Rae’s thing, so we’ll definitely keep some of that,” Dixon says. “But I definitely want to lighten up the space, and it just needs to be revamped a little bit. So I’m excited to kind of bring in gold and different pinks and just kind of mix it up.”
Dixon wants the Dallas bakery to be a neighborhood spot where people can just stop by and grab a cake for a birthday or cookies for a dinner party.
“I just hope that we can build a name for ourselves in Dallas,” Dixon says. “There are already so many great bakeries, so I think getting our name out there is going to be the biggest thing at the beginning.”
J. Rae’s is at 5600 W. Lovers Lane, Suite 143, Dallas.
Story updated April 5, 2021, with news of the opening date.