La Casita Bakeshop

Maricsa Trejo & Alex Henderson

If you go into a coffee shop in Dallas, Ft. Worth, or even a suburb in one of the two, you will most likely be faced with one woman's work. It doesn't matter how different these shops are, if they're fancy, neighborhood friendly or if they artisanally roast their beans. As long as they want the best for their customers then they all inevitably go to Maricsa Trejo for their pastry needs. If you have had a croissant in beautiful coffee shop in Dallas TX over the past 4 years that was exceptionally delicious it was probably made, laminated, baked, packaged and delivered by this one baker.

Maricsa, with only the help of her husband/partner, built a fundamental and unique quirk in DFW with her La Casita Bakeshop. The name La Casita Bakeshop came from her mother's affinity to adding “ita” to words she deems are for cute, little things that the words themselves don't show enough appreciation for. “Ita" translates to “little” in Spanish which is Maricsa's first language given that both of her parents immigrated to Texas from Mexico literally weeks before she was born. The flavors of her family's heritage can be tasted even through some of the french-iest of pastries made at the Bakeshop offered only on Saturday mornings to the public from 10 am to 3 pm.

The young couple eventually moved to New York and from there over the next four years lived in Portland, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and backpacked through Thailand working as chefs in high end restaurants and bakeries along the way. When they finally settled back in Dallas to create something completely their own, they were torn between doing 6 coursed dinners for small parties or starting a bakery. They decided a bakery would make a bigger impact on the food scene in Dallas than dinner parties ever could.

Maricsa and her partner took up work at a brewery and agreed with the owners that if they made all the bread for free they could work there when the kitchen was empty. They took their savings from the first few paychecks they received and bought a sheeter off Craigslist. That night they made their first batch of croissants in the creaky, slightly dingy, back of a small brewery in Oak Cliff.

For the next three years they would do everything themselves. Driving around to coffee shops with boxes of pastries trying to get owners to give them a chance as the new kids on the block in the pastry underworld where there were few small contenders that never lasted more than a few months. She was a ghost in the night working backwards hours between 11 pm and 9 am seven days a week and leaving boxes of pastries for coffee shop baristas to find and in back in the early pre-dawn hours of the morning.

This past year they finally made their way into a brick and mortar shop in one of the oldest shopping centers in a suburb of Dallas. With nothing but a La Casita Bakeshop logo sticker on the top of the door they planned the opening day of the Saturday morning storefront. Not knowing if anyone would want or be interested in their pastries or bread they nervously spent the evening into early morning packing what they felt would be an impossible amount of pastries to move and fearing it would go into the garbage the next afternoon.

A small line started to form outside the unknown bakery the following morning 2 hours before they were open. An hour later the line was 50 people deep and by the time the door opened the line was almost 100 and over a block long with the reverberation of people anxiously talking about croissants, cruffins and bread you could hear from the kitchen of the small bakery.

Though covid has changed things at the bakery, they have made pre-ordering available Wednesday through Friday for Saturday pick up and opened up the store to a few people at a time. While there is still lots of work to be done Maricsa Trejo has only begun to make positive change in Dallas/ Ft. Worth and only the future knows how much the croissant queen will accomplish.