When times are tough, sometimes it’s the little things that mean the most.A home-cooked meal or a custom birthday cake can bring joy. Two recently launched Loudoun organizations are filling bellies and creating community—one meal and one cake at a time.

Cake Love from Cake4Kids

Dottie Swanson is the ambassador of the Cake4Kids Loudoun chapter.

Baking enthusiast Dottie Swanson launched the Loudoun chapter of Cake4Kids last August. Cake4Kids also is a national nonprofit launched in 2010 to provide special occasion cakes and treats for children in need, including kids in shelters and foster care. The concept is to connect volunteer bakers with children to bring sweetness and joy to special occasions in the face of big problems like homelessness and job loss.

“Think about your life—you have a cake for every event…Some of these children have never had a birthday cake,” Swanson said. “To know that there’s somebody in their community that they don’t know, that they’ll never meet, made them a custom birthday cake. It helps the children, and it helps the family, too.”

Swanson, who lives in Willowsford, is a hobby baker whose passion for baking was passed on from her grandfather, a cook in the U.S. Army during World War II. Swanson got involved with the Cake4Kids Northern Virginia chapter as a baker and volunteered to coordinate the launch of the Loudoun chapter last year. Cake4Kids doesn’t take direct orders. Instead, the organization works with social service agencies around Loudoun to match clients with bakers, including the Sterling-based nonprofit INMED Partnerships for Children.

“They’re doing an amazing job,” said INMED’s Rosa Tobar, who adds that for many of her clients, a personalized birthday cake is a luxury they can’t afford, as COVID-related job loss and other factors create challenges. Tobar helps coordinate cake pick-ups for her clients and said she was especially touched when one young client got the LOL doll cake of her dreams.

“Her eyes just opened wide as soon as she saw it,” Tobar said.

Cake4Kids now has 75 Loudoun-based bakers on board and another 75 in the region who deliver to Loudoun. Volunteers are mostly home bakers, but the group includes professionals, too. Bakers offer gorgeous and delicious cakes, along with brownies, cookies and other goodies for graduations and other special events. Since launching last summer, the group has delivered 115 “bakes” of all kinds and is ready to serve more kids through partner agencies. Swanson says that as new volunteers come on board, the chapter is ready to take on additional agency partners and hopes more organizations will reach out so that she and her bakers can help brighten special days for more Loudoun kids.

Swanson says that when she’s baking for Cake4Kids, she often puts two days into each project.

“A lot goes into those cakes,” Swanson said. “Driving away after delivering a cake, it is so worth it: the joy of knowing that I’ve helped a child on their birthday.”

For more information, go to cake4kids.org/our-chapters-loudoun. Caseworkers and volunteer bakers can also contact Swanson atdottie@cake4kids.org.

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