Walk into Cream & Sugar on a Tuesday morning and the first thing you notice isn’t the display case — it’s the smell. Browned butter and cardamom, something faintly citrusy. It hits before you’ve even pushed the door all the way open.
The shop sits on Hickory Street a few blocks west of the square, in a low brick building that used to be a tax preparer’s office. Kayla Merritt opened it in 2019 after spending years doing custom cake orders out of her home kitchen, driving finished tiers across North Texas in the back seat of her Subaru. She’ll tell you that story if you ask, usually while piping a rosette without looking up. She’s been known to give a five-minute rundown of what she got wrong in the first six months — the walk-in she bought secondhand that frosted everything unevenly, the croissant dough she scrapped and started over three times — without a trace of self-pity. She talks about baking failures the way a mechanic talks about engines.
That candor carries into the product. Cream & Sugar doesn’t try to be everything. The rotating case on any given weekday might hold eight to ten items: maybe a brown butter blondie, a lemon curd tart in a shortbread shell, a thick slice of banana cake with miso caramel frosting, and whatever laminated pastry Kayla’s been working on that week. The selection changes enough that regulars check the shop’s Instagram the night before to plan their morning.
The coffee is Cuvée, pulled on a La Marzocco that Kayla bought used from a closing café in Fort Worth. She does one house drip and two espresso drinks. That’s it. No cold brew menu, no blended anything. If that sounds limiting, it isn’t — the cortado here is exceptionally good, balanced in a way that makes you think about it later.
Saturday is the day to go if you’ve never been. The case is fullest by 9 a.m., and the croissants — plain and one rotating filled variety, lately pistachio cream — sell out consistently before 11. But if you go on a Wednesday at 2 p.m., you might end up at the counter for twenty minutes talking to Kayla herself about why she thinks American buttercream is overused, or watching her walk a nervous first-time custom-cake client through a tasting. The shop has the particular energy of a place run by someone who genuinely wants to be there.
Prices are fair for the craft involved — pastries generally run $4–$7, a slice of layer cake is around $9, and a whole custom cake starts at $85 and goes up depending on complexity. There’s no pressure to order big. A single cookie and a drip coffee is a completely acceptable transaction and nobody makes you feel otherwise.
Custom orders are where Cream & Sugar has built most of its word-of-mouth. Kayla does wedding cakes, but she’s equally known around Denton for elaborate birthday builds — the kind with hand-painted tiers or pressed edible flowers — that people drive from Frisco and McKinney to pick up. Lead time is usually two to three weeks for anything custom.
It’s a small operation run by someone who cares too much about the details to scale it into something impersonal. In Denton, that tends to be the formula for something that lasts.
