After two years and thousands of cupcakes, Armory Square bakery Peace, Love, and Cupcakes will shut its doors.
The bakery, owned by Rebecca Riley and her husband Christopher, opened on 121 W. Fayette Street in November 2020, in the middle of the pandemic.
“It’s safe to say that the odds were stacked against us from the start,” wrote Riley in a Thursday Facebook post announcing the store’s closing.
And yet, the couple plugged along, turning out trays and trays of cookies, cupcakes, cakes and other sweets for over two years. Often money was tight, wrote Riley, “… but every single time, we busted our asses, and our support system showed up, and we pulled through.”
Riley employed the cupcake shop for community projects, too, setting up a pay-it-forward system in the store and regularly donating money or sweets to local organizations despite the shop’s own tight margins.
When the shop first opened, the couple donated all their extra bakes to local health care and restaurant workers, said Riley. They handed out hundreds of free Black Lives Matter cookies, and last year baked and delivered a wedding cake to a lesbian couple in Pennsylvania that had been denied a cake from their local bakery that objected to gay marriage.
“When we share our cake on our one year (anniversary), not only will we remember the love between us, but the love you and Chris brought us and you guys saving our wedding day,” wrote Desirie Page Dowd, of the couple who received the wedding cake, on the bakery’s popular Facebook page.
Riley wrote that the summer of 2022 returned “less than stellar” sales from the store and that two water main breaks in the fall additionally put them back. Plus closures from COVID and rising prices due to inflation, “we just weren’t able to get back up.”
The shop first opened on Burnet Avenue in 2019 and then moved to Armory Square in 2020. It will remain open through the end of March. Riley started baking as a hobby while waitressing at Denny’s about a decade ago.
She and Christopher started the Armory Square store with a $5,000 loan and elbow grease, Riley wrote.
“Two poor kids from East Syracuse made it to Armory Square. We started with nothing, never saw a penny in covid relief funds, never hired a single employee, and still managed to make it just shy of two and a half years. It’s something to be proud of and that’s what we are grasping onto right now. Not what might have been, not what’s lost, but what was.
“And what was, was pretty damn special.”
The store will be open on Friday and Saturday as usual, but not today, wrote Riley in a separate Facebook post.
“We just need some time and maybe a little bit of grace.”
Jules Struck writes about life and culture in and around Syracuse. Contact her anytime at jstruck@syracuse.com or on Instagram at julesstruck.journo.
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