Dennis Gregg still gets a kick out of telling the story.

He and his wife, Carol, had just sunk a healthy chunk of their retirement savings into opening their Pastry Art Bake Shoppe in downtown Homewood.

It was a late-in-life leap of faith in which they banked on Carol’s baking skills and Dennis’ business savvy.

A couple of weeks before the Alabama couple opened their bakery, though, Dennis noticed a tray of bite-sized miniature cakes that his wife had just taken out of the oven.

“Carol, what are these?’’ he wondered.

“Well,” she replied, “we call them Baby Bites.”

“What are you going to sell them for?”

“I’m going to sell them for a dollar and a quarter each.”

Dennis did the math in his head and realized how many tens of thousands of Baby Bites they would have to sell to recoup their investment in the shop.

Then he walked outside, plopped down on the sidewalk, and, he says, started to cry.

“We aren’t going to make it,” he said to himself.

A smile creeps across Carol’s face as her husband shares that story from 17 years ago.

“They were delicious,” she reminds him.

“They were,” he says, “but I didn’t really grasp the concept. I thought, ‘Here goes our retirement out the window.’”

“I was nice,” Carol says. “I didn’t say, ‘I told you so.’”

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A life-changing opportunity

The Greggs, who met while attending Freed-Hardeman College in Henderson, Tenn., moved to Birmingham from Chattanooga in 1980.

Dennis was in the furniture business, and Carol was an artist who loved to paint and design needlework.

She got into commercial baking by chance, when, in the mid-1990s, Dennis’ sister, Norma Walker, opened Cameo Café on Fifth Avenue North in downtown Birmingham. Carol worked with her sister-in-law as a hostess at the restaurant.

“It was real serendipity,” Dennis recalls. “The cakes and desserts that my sister was buying were so bad that Carol looked at her and said, ‘I think I can do better than that.’”

It wasn’t long before Carol developed quite a following for her strawberry, caramel, chocolate, vanilla, and red velvet cakes. Her sister-in-law sold the café a few years later, but the cake orders kept coming.

“The phone never stopped ringing,” Dennis says. “I’d get home on the weekend, and you couldn’t get in the house for all the cakes.”

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One of Carol’s best customers was Zoe Cassimus, who, along with her husband, Marcus, operated Zoe’s Kitchen on 29th Avenue South in Homewood.

Zoe Cassimus had ordered Carol’s cakes for family celebrations, and when Zoe’s Kitchen moved into a new location in SoHo Square, she called Carol to see if she and Dennis would be interested in opening a bake shop in the old Zoe’s space.

“We had 24 hours to decide whether we wanted it or not,” Carol remembers. “It was one of those, ‘If I don’t do it, I’ll never know if I could’ (opportunities).”

The Greggs opened Pastry Art Bake Shoppe four months later, in April 2006.

“We were welcomed into the community,” Dennis says. “We were really blessed in that regard – and still are. We still have some customers that came the first week that we opened — really good customers.”

Eventually, they moved their bake shop from its original location to a larger spot just a couple of doors down the street.

And for 10 years, they also operated a second location off U.S. 280 in Inverness, but about two and a half years ago, they closed that shop and opened another on Gadsden Highway in Trussville, where they have lived since 1989.

The one and only

The Pastry Art menu also includes a variety of cakes, cupcakes and cookies, but those dainty and delicious Baby Bites — Carol’s reimagining of a traditional French petit four — are the stars of the show.

“It’s our signature,” she says. “If people hear Baby Bites, then they know where they came from.”

“People have tried to knock us off,” Dennis adds. “They haven’t done a really good job.”

Carol first made her bite-sized cakes for their daughter’s high school graduation celebration, she says, and thought they would be a good addition to the bake shop’s menu. The name Baby Bites just popped into her head one day.

“They’re very small, like a baby, and it’s a bite,” she says. “It’s just a Baby Bite.”

Soon after they opened, the Greggs trademarked the name, and they remain vigilant about protecting it from copycats.

“Nobody (else) can use the name Baby Bites,” Dennis says. “I’ve shut down several people that have tried to do that. They can call them any kind of bites they want to as long as it’s not Baby Bites.”

“We will come after them,” Carol adds.

Carol prepares the dry mix that’s used to make the cake batter for the Baby Bites all by herself, and her recipe is such a closely guarded secret that Dennis says even he doesn’t know what all goes into it.

“We don’t share it with anybody,” he says. “That’s what pays the bills.”

(The Greggs do, however, have a licensing agreement with Emily Sharman, who worked with them at their Homewood shop, and it allows her to sell Baby Bites at her Baby Bite Bake Shop in Huntsville, which opened in 2018.)

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While they started out with about five flavors of Baby Bites, the Greggs now offer a rotating selection of as many as 20 flavors each week — everything from key lime to pink strawberry, pumpkin spice to chocolate espresso.

“I can eat ‘em like M&M’s,” Dennis says. “There’s just so many flavors that you never really get tired of them.”

Customers order them by the dozens, and sometimes the hundreds, to commemorate life’s major milestones — from weddings to baby showers, birthdays to graduations, retirement parties to memorial services.

Many, though, don’t need to wait for a special occasion and just drop in to get a box to satisfy their craving.

The Greggs won’t say just how many Baby Bites they sell in any given month or year, but they will talk about their biggest single order — when the Alabama megachurch Church of the Highlands put in a request for 14,000 of the miniature cakes.

“And we filled the order and didn’t have any problem filling it,” Dennis says. “You can’t give us an order too big.”

A dynamic duo

The Greggs, married since 1968, play to one another’s strengths. He’s the businessperson, and she’s the visionary.

Dennis, the more visible and outgoing of the two, wears a chef’s coat embroidered with “The Baby Bite Man,” a moniker he has embraced over the years.

As much as he loves chatting with the customers, Carol is just as happy behind the scenes, creating her confectioner’s art.

“I’m the front guy, the one that people see,” Dennis says. “She’s the one that makes it all happen.”

The Homewood location of Pastry Art Bake Shoppe is at 1917 29th Ave. South, and the phone is 205-877-3852. The Trussville location is at 1430 Gadsden Highway, No. 104, and the phone is 205-508-4000. For more information, go here.

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