Meringue Bakery: Cakes made to steal the show

Lori Kaye Lodes

Contributor

July 21, 2025

LA CROSSE – The La Crosse community can have their cake – delicious, artisan cake – and eat it, too. 

Jen Barney said that may be the unspoken mantra at Meringue Bakery (313 Main St., La Crosse), where palate-tempting, beautifully decorated cakes are at the heart of the business.

A pastry chef and owner of Meringue, Barney said she started the business small in an industrial, health-certified kitchen in her home basement.

But, she said the excitement for her cakes whisked feverishly, quickly taking her from a dream of doing one to two wedding cakes a week to a full-fledged business.

Media catches wind of Barney’s talents

Barney said she established the bakery in her home in 2016, looking to balance her passion for baking with the duties of being a mom.

She said she picked the name Meringue Bakery because it “sounded bougie” and as a meaningful nod to the meringue that is a fundamental part of everyday baking.

A classically trained baker and pastry chef and graduate of the acclaimed Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts, Barney said she started her career as a wedding cake decorator before setting up shop in her basement.

Then, and now, she said cake-making is a labor of love that started in high school when she would stock up on grocery store magazines in October to plan her holiday baking.

“It was an Olympic sport, but I didn’t know then you could connect art with food,” she said. “I didn’t understand you could be a pastry chef until my early to mid-20s when I went to culinary school.”

Barney said it’s a good thing she did, as word spread of her highly detailed and artistic cakes not only among clients and people they knew, but all the way to the Food Network.

The business grew very quickly, especially after Barney participated in the first of what would be five Food Network shows – this one, called the Holiday Baking Championship – that aired in fall 2017.

Barney said her daughter was two months old and her son was a year old when she received the phone call to participate.

As busy as she was, she said she signed on. 

“I went on that journey because you say, ‘yes, of course,’ to that ask,” she said. “It was enticing, and I went into it a bit naively, not realizing it was a really popular show.”

Barney – who is sometimes called “the doyenne of desserts” – said when she returned home, she had to remain mum that she was the winner of the championship until that fall.

Simultaneously, she said the experience prompted her to continue soul-searching about whether to establish the brick-and-mortar shop she had envisioned having when her children were older or continue her basement operation.

“I realized you have to strike while the iron is hot – that I wouldn’t be the cool new thing forever,” she said. “We [started down a two-year path] of looking at places, creating a business plan and getting an SBA loan – that took some time. I was really impatient [with the process], but in hindsight, I’m grateful we had the time because we didn’t rush into it.”

In the meantime, Barney said her participation in the Holiday Baking Championship was followed by being a contender in Pillsbury Bakers’ Plus Creative Decorating Competition, Food Network Canada’s The Big Bake and a Season 5 Champion Homecoming Special Edition holiday baking competitions.

Collectively, she said the exposure from these competitions helped to put her desserts on the map, and her fierce culinary skills won her three Food Network Baking Championship titles.

“In terms of my growth and the growth of the business, they were huge,” she said. “During the first competition, we were on the front page of the local newspaper every day, and people came out of the woodwork wanting to help me with my business – it was beautiful.”

Making the retail store a reality

And still, Barney said the timing to open the brick-and-mortar location wasn’t quite right.

Intending to open the bakery to the public the month the COVID-19 shutdowns occurred in March 2020, Barney said she knew it wasn’t quite time.

Many of the large businesses whose employees could have brought business through the bakery’s doors, she said, weren’t leaving home for offices.

Barney said she opened her much-anticipated retail space that spring, featuring a different kind of bakery with a single glass case featuring the highest quality, fresh, made-from-scratch bakery items.

Today, she said that includes cakes, pastries, croissants and more.

“Our focus was, and is, to have quality, fresh bakery not in quantity but in quality,” she said. “Cakes were always at the heart of the business – we like to make high-end, high-detail cakes, including real-looking artisan flowers. [But I also] wanted a case that is stocked fresh at the beginning of every day with the goal to sell out by the end of the day.”

Ideally, Barney said she wanted the offerings within the glass case to have been made within just a few hours of customers’ purchases.

Having a smaller selection, she said, can mean everyone’s favorites are not always available, but there’s a workaround for that. 

“That’s when we suggest preordering, so we have the items you want,” she said. “I wanted a case that moved with how I felt and wasn’t tied down to having the same things in it every day. It’s a good representation of creativity and freshness.”

Cakes make for a labor of love

Many of the bakery’s items – especially the cakes – Barney said, are works of art and produced by one of her nine pastry chefs.

Simply recording a detailed cake order, she said, may require 20 minutes, and then there is the time invested in making, baking and decorating the cake.

When someone orders a lemon poppyseed or lavender cake, Barney said she will tailor other baking around the orders, making six or eight of a specific cake with extras available for purchase. 

“That is easily a whole day of labor with making lemon curd, building the [cakes] and decorating them,” she said. “My business is 100% a labor of love – we are all highly detailed and highly artistic.”

Barney said it’s a team she has spent some time building but one that works well together. 

The team’s “lookbook,” she said, highlights their shared passion, emphasizing how orders and purchases allow talented pastry chefs to have a career in La Crosse doing what they love. 

“Every day, we get to make people happy through kindness, nourishment and something sweet,” she said. “We want to help you celebrate and look forward to creating desserts that are beautiful, delicious and extraordinary.”

Barney said she has learned many business lessons along the way – whether that’s how to assemble the right team or that she wasn’t cut out to run a cafe.

The bakery, she said, used to offer a cafe as well, but a lot of the cafe staff tended to be college students who weren’t available during holidays and other high times.

Barney said she quickly discovered that the time spent making cafe sandwiches or coffee was diverted from hand-painting and sculpting cakes.

Fortunately, she said, the word on the street was that another woman-owned business – Nom, Sips & Eats – was looking to expand its cafe business focused on nutrient-dense goodies. 

Barney said she met with that business’ owner, and within three months, she was set up and operating in the Meringue Bakery cafe space, serving smoothies, smoothie bowls, protein coffee drinks and more.

In addition, Barney said Nom, Sips & Eats’ staff also serves Meringue’s customers from the display of desserts. 

“I feel very fortunate our partnership is [still] going after a year now, and is going very well,” she said. 

Though the front of the house is home to both businesses, Barney said Meringue uses about 90% of the kitchen space for its operations.

“Getting rid of the [original] cafe was one of the best things that happened to me, as it opened time for me to pursue things more beneficial to the bakery,” she said. 

Barney said that has included engaging with a coffee shop called MOKA, which has five of its 20 stores in the La Crosse area.

Meringue Bakery, she said, now provides bakery products to those stores every day. 

“The stores have lots of traffic, and if I had still had the cafe, that would have been a conflict of interest,” she said. “It was huge for our business to expand that way. It’s funny how things like that line up.”

Nowadays, Barney said cakes rank No. 1 in terms of popularity at Meringue Bakery, and about 75% of them are what she describes as typical birthday cakes.

The remaining 25%, she said, she considers “extreme custom cakes,” with a significant level of detail – whether it’s the fins of a fish or a terrain that houses Smurfs.

The wholesale sales to MOKA, Barney said, rank No. 2 in sales, followed by a few other retail accounts with restaurants to whom Meringue Bakery provides desserts.

Barney said she is at her best when she’s being creative.

Whether that’s discussing recipes for the forthcoming peaches delivery from the peach delivery truck or making the viral Dubai chocolate dessert, she said she’s always creating new things. 

“I get my creativity all over the place – sometimes, it’s as simple as a farmer reaching out with a plethora of edible flowers and figuring out how we can help them out,” she said. 

What’s next: Education

Though classes have been offered at Meringue Bakery since after the pandemic, Barney said those are currently on a hiatus to allow time to film modules for Better Baker Academy, a digital-based platform designed for people who own bakeries or similar outfits who want to shorten their new hires’ training time by up to 50%.

Barney said the subscription-based platform will offer training modules – currently being recorded in her home’s basement kitchen that is outfitted to look like a studio.
“Through the training modules, I can teach their staff how to manage certain things every business needs to know, so they can focus on what makes their business unique,” she said.

Barney said this will include segments on core topics such as bakery etiquette and three-compartment sink sanitation.

She said it’s an opportunity to provide another revenue stream, helping to mitigate the doubling, if not tripling of chocolate prices, as well as significant increases in utility repairs and other costs. 

“These are things that are important for everybody to know, but I know as a busy bakery owner, there are days I don’t stop moving,” she said. “So, to have help knocking out that stuff is very enticing and something I’m excited about.”

Barney said to create a deadline for the project, she booked a booth at an international bakery exposition in Las Vegas in September, and is working with a consultant to finalize the module production by then. 

“We did a lot of market research, and while there are people selling [training] to bakers, nobody is focused on how to help you train your staff fast,” she said.