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A stone’s throw from the White House, near 17th and K streets, sits a bakery that is focused on treats made with sweet potatoes as the main ingredient.
One goal of DC Sweet Potato Cake is to celebrate the heritage and history of African American culinary delights that spring from this root vegetable not only during Black History Month, but year-round.
“As a woman, as a person of color, and being in business and owning DC Sweet Potato Cake, it is my obligation, it is my purpose, to figure out how to directly connect my company to historical roots,” said April Richardson, who has been in the baking business as co-owner of DC Sweet Potato Cake since 2009.
“It is a product that came to me through my business partner, Derek Lowery. His mom, back in the day, used to make a sweet potato cake, and her sweet potato cake is the basis for our recipes,” Richardson told WTOP.
Part of their purpose is sharing how sweet potatoes became a staple among African Americans — starting in the past with provisions enslavers bought for the enslaved to eat during the trans-Atlantic journey. They purchased “yams, from West Africa to feed them throughout the journey.”
“And remember, the journey lasted for more than three months. And when enslaved Africans came to the U.S., after their replenishment of yams were gone, they found sweet potatoes. And sweet potatoes became a staple in the enslaved African diet,” Richardson said.
Richardson also said there’s a lot of history in sugar, another key ingredient in their treats.
“Sugar cane farming was the toughest type of farming that an enslaved African had to endure — so much that the average life span of an enslaved African was 7 to 10 years on a sugar cane farm,” Richardson said.
So she worked to include sugar that originated from Black-owned sugar cane farms in the company’s cakes.
New to Retail
This is their first foray into the retail space. Since Richardson joined the company as a co-owner, their focus has been on manufacturing cakes and getting them into hundreds of stores around the D.C. area and on your TV screens on QVC.
“We decided to try something on QVC, which was the bourbon sweet potato cake,” Richardson said. “That became our number one seller. … There are six different iterations of a sweet potato cake here. And that’s our number one: a bourbon sweet potato cake.”
Their menu includes a variety of items including smoothies, salads and more. Sweet treats include cake shakes, sweet potato pie and banana pudding with layers of sweet potato cake.
“Most people know sweet potato pie. We are teaching people about the sweet potato cake. And once they learn, they are great students,” Richardson said.
“One little special secret about sweet potatoes … there are 400 varieties of sweet potatoes. Four hundred. It’s a lot — from the purple sweet potato with the purple skin, to the purple sweet potatoes with the white skin, to the red colored skin with the orange flesh … different shapes, different sizes. It’s such a fantastic vegetable to include in a very unique way,” Richardson said.
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