Brown Sugar Bakery, Chicago

###Four Things to Know About Brown Sugar Bakery Baking wasn’t always in Stephanie Hart’s career plan, but it was in her blood. She spent 20 years running a technology company, but she never forgot the sumptuous Southern cakes that her grandmother used to bake. When her grandmother died, Stephanie decided those sweets deserved to be shared with the world. So she opened Brown Sugar Bakery, and since then, she’s been elbow-deep in flour, butter, and sugar, whipping up a whole host of decadent desserts. Read on to learn more about the bakery: * **You’ll never learn the secrets of Stephanie’s caramel cake.** One of the hands-down customer favorites at Brown Sugar is the multilayered caramel cake. But Stephanie’s keeping that recipe top secret. She actually learned to make the cake from an older Southern woman in Mississippi, after traveling around the country to pick up recipes for her new bakery. * **But you can pick up some frosting tips.** On the Brown Sugar website, you’ll find step-by-step video instructions on how to make Stephanie’s brown-sugar cream cheese and peanut-butter-chocolate cream cheese frostings. She’s even been known to share her pound cake recipe (pro tip: it involves three sticks of butter and three cups of sugar). * **Cakes are inspired by some high-rollers.** Stephanie whips up nearly 20 cake flavors at Brown Sugar. One of those is the “Obama cake”—a cream-cheese-frosted, four-layer creation of chocolate, red velvet, and yellow cakes topped with chocolate and pecans. * **Stephanie is no stranger to the spotlight.** You can find Stephanie and Brown Sugar Bakery all over your TV. The bakery has been featured on Chicago’s Best, and was named “America’s Best Bakery” on the Steve Harvey show. Stephanie competed on Food Network’s Holiday Baking Championship, and she even shows up in Lupe Fiasco’s “Mission” music video.