The Rise Of New Germany’s Roadside Cake Stand

NEW GERMANY – Picture a clear summer day. The sun beats down as you cruise down a road in rural Nova Scotia.

Along the side of the highway, at the end of a farmhouse driveway, sits a rickety table piled with freshly picked veggies, or maybe boxes of gleaming strawberries. No one’s watching it—there’s just a handwritten sign and a small box to leave your money.

There aren’t a lot of places in Canada where you can still find these roadside stands. But, as any Maritimers will tell you, there’s a special magic to them that somehow just makes things taste better.

Now, a New Germany entrepreneur has put her own sweet twist on the long-time Nova Scotia tradition.

Shauna Leighton is the owner and operator of Cake By The Maples, a self-serve, roadside cake stand stocked with a bounty of hand-made sweets.

Leighton opened the stand in May, mostly as an outlet for her baking, but the colourful cake shed has quickly grown into a minor phenomenon.

In an interview with Huddle, Leighton said she has always been fascinated with the roadside stands— usually selling berries or veggies – that dot the rural roads of Nova Scotia’s farm country.

“I didn’t see a lot of them around here .. and I just thought, I’m going do that for cake. I’m going to see if people buy my cake off the side of the road,” she recalled.

“I remember putting it out on the side of the road and [thinking], am I allowed to do this?” she added with a chuckle.

Leighton has always been a baker. She started out by helping her mom when she was a kid and deepened her love of the craft thanks to a steady diet of Food Network stars like Anna Olsen and Ina Garten.

As an adult, she was always the person baking for friends and family and bringing home-made goods to parties and events.

Her idea to open Cake By The Maples came after she had been out of the workforce for about five years. Her kids, Griffin and Stella, were becoming slightly more self-sufficient, leaving her a little more time to bake.

But she never dreamed that, in just four months, her small, roadside stand would become such a big business.

At first, she said, a lot of people wondered exactly what the strange, colourful shed by the road was. But then she created a Facebook page and started posting updates and things took off quickly.

“I didn’t mean to do this. I just started putting stuff outside thinking wouldn’t it be cool if somebody bought my muffins? Then it just became bigger and I started making more and now it’s like, okay, people are expecting to see stuff in there. It just became a thing,” she said.

“I remember the first time I emptied my money jar and I’m like, ‘oh my God, there’s 80 bucks in there –

holy smokes.  And now I’m making a living at it,” she said.

Leighton thinks part of what had made Cake By The Maples so successful is its novelty – and being helped along by a few high-profile social media mentions – but at the end of the day the product needs to be good.

“When people come here, I think they come [because] the stuff tastes good inside the cabinet. But they also like the experience, because it’s something they see on social media, or they’ve heard about through word of mouth.”

Leighton said she never viewed herself as a businessperson. She admits she still doesn’t know a lot about running a business but that she’s eager to learn.

Eventually, she said, she hopes to upgrade from her roadside stand to a full-fledged, retail bakery.

And while that’s still a little while off, Leighton said the last few months running Cake By The Maples has been incredibly rewarding.

“I feel really like I’m fitting everything in at this point, and that’s good because I know that I’m more than Mom and doing Mom things. [Running this business] is fulfilling the other part of myself that I knew was in there but I just didn’t know what it was or when I was going to be able to access it.”

Trevor Nichols is the associate editor of Huddle, based in Halifax. Send him your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].