What’s New York about gluten-free desserts? For this Tacoma bakery, ‘everything’

Lydia Mendez is on a mission to “bring home here.” More specifically, she is baking an array of sweet treats — all gluten-free — from a commissary kitchen in Tacoma that pay homage to her diverse upbringing in Brooklyn and her family’s newfound home of eight years and counting.

Her mobile and wholesale bakery goes by the name Little Miss Sweets NYC. If you meet her, you’ll immediately take note of her Brooklyn accent, and if you keep the conversation going, your attention will undoubtedly turn to her tenacious spirit and down-to-earth approach to a dietary reality that affects hundreds of thousands of people across the United States and millions around the world: She can’t eat gluten.

When she was diagnosed with celiac disease — the autoimmune disorder that causes the small intestine to attack itself in the presence of this sometimes-pesky protein found in grains, including wheat, rye and barley — she was shell-shocked.

“I grew up around food,” said Mendez while whipping up New York-style cheesecakes at My Commercial Kitchen in Central Tacoma. (Ovens are shared, but she takes care to use her own equipment including mixers, pans and utensils.) Big parties with tables overflowed with an eclectic collection of homecooked specialties you can only find in the most diverse city in the world.

Mendez was born in New York to a mother of Puerto Rican heritage, but she has only gotten to know her biological family in the past few years. She was adopted by an Italian family from the Bronx and co-raised, in the community sense, in Flatbush by their neighbor, “an old-school Brooklyn Jewish woman” who became her de facto granny, she recalled. Much of their neighborhood was Caribbean. One of her favorite places to eat in the neighborhood was Junior’s, an iconic midcentury restaurant and bakery on Flatbush Avenue. The diner is beloved for many things — including telling the “Sex and the City” film crew they could shoot the television show’s final episode in 2008 but declining to shut down the restaurant because “our customers are always our number one priority” — but the cheesecake tops the list.

Little Miss Sweets’ cheesecake “is like a mimic of that,” said Mendez.

The batter, whose bright-white peaks evoke soft pudding, is deceivingly simple: eggs, sugar, cream, cornstarch, vanilla and a heck of a lot of cream cheese.

Although Tillamook rules in the Pacific Northwest, Mendez exclusively uses Philadelphia Original “to keep that East Coast flavor.”

Philadelphia cream cheese was not, it turns out, invented in Pennsylvania. It was a New York creation — the result of an upstate dairy farmer’s late-19th-century experiments in smoothing out Neufchâtel, a drier, slightly crumbly soft German cheese. At the time, New York history buffs posit, Pennsylvania Dutch dairy was prized over home-state products.

The original New York-style cheesecake did not have a crust. For some, including Mendez, it never will. Graham-cracker crusts likely originated in the 1950s, as love for the dessert — which hadn’t historically been all that sweet — spread outside of the city. In an effort to differentiate themselves, bakers added ingredients like sour cream (Chicago), ricotta (Italian) or cornstarch (Japanese). Eggs and even sugar weren’t found in early recipes.

Mendez’s inspiration at Junior’s, in fact, uses a sponge-cake base. Her classic cake is crust-less, though, and ex-Brooklynites notice.

Little Miss Sweets joined the Puyallup and Proctor farmers markets for the first time this year. Mendez described the look of certain New Yorkers approaching the booth, eyebrows raised.

“What makes it New York?” they’ll ask.

“I can kind of see it in their eyes,” said Mendez. “I know what you want. It’s like they’re testing me.”

The only correct answer: “It has no crust.”

She bakes hers in square pans, placed inside a larger hotel pan to hold the essential steamy water bath. The finished cake is sliced into smaller squares and carefully transferred into clamshell containers sealed with a blue label. They are delivered to refrigerators at local grocers around Pierce and King counties (see below for details).

The classic plain is, of course, a favorite, but other flavors have some fun — and break the no-crust rule.

The Strawberry Crunch is swirled with jam and capped with “cookie crunchies” and white chocolate, intended to evoke the strawberry shortcake ice cream bar by Good Humor. The Peach Cobbler starts with a gluten-free snickerdoodle crust and finishes with brown-sugar-roasted fruit. The crustless Cookies’n’Cream features gluten-free Oreos throughout the batter and sprinkled on top with a Belgian chocolate ganache and a white chocolate drizzle. The bright-purple ube has quickly climbed the ranks, said Mendez, made with a Filipino root-veg paste that she sources from Sari Sari Store in Puyallup.

One forkful and you’ll be having dessert for dinner.

Gluten-free dessert for Tacoma, with love from New York

“We’re not different just because we’re gluten-free,” said Mendez. “We’re people. Our tastes haven’t changed. It’s not a fad diet — it’s real life.”

Some estimates show that around 25% of people in the United States adhere to a gluten-free diet, even if only 1% of them have been diagnosed with celiac and around 6% suffer from an intolerance. Researchers believe that number could be higher, though. The only way to diagnose the ailment is through bloodwork, but to confirm the autoimmune disease requires a biopsy into the impacted small intestine — a procedure not every patient is willing to undergo, according to Edmonds-based dietitian Anca Soloschi.

As awareness of gluten-free eating permeated American culture in the past 30 years or so, products developed to meet that demand — whether out of choice or necessity — slumped into a “healthy” bucket, posited Mendez.

“I can eat fat. I can eat sugar,” she said. With her bakery business, she set out to offer those simple pleasures in a safe and cost-friendly way for people like her and everyone else. “I wanted to find a cost that’s the same as what’s out there, but actually good.”

Little Miss Sweets’ cheesecakes, dense as the sticky mug of a humid summer evening wiled away on the stoop of a Brooklyn brownstone, teach the palate that this American delicacy needs no crust. Mendez also weaves her diverse upbringing through treats that usually call for AP flour and some that are inherently free of the allergen that changed her life.

Her lemon-ricotta cake honors her adoptive mother, as does a classic tiramisu with gluten-free ladyfingers and Puerto Rican coffee, and almond-cake rainbow cookies layered with jam and iced with dark chocolate. She modeled her Caribbean-style tres leches after a Dominican sponge cake with homemade whipped cream and learned to make the rich, custard flan of her island relatives. The pastelitos are a unique combination of a Cuban pastry and Jewish rugelach dough — instead with a gluten-free flour blend. She fills the flaky snacks with flavors that connect all of those dots: Nutella, apple-cinnamon, pineapple or guava.

“I was blessed to grow up with such diverse cultures,” said the chef, who is also the founder of the multicultural food event, SavorFest PNW, which welcomed several hundred people to Hilltop in July. “I had all these different flavors, so when it comes to, ‘What’s New York about what I do?’ All these flavors that I want to encompass in the company come from my diverse background and what I grew up with, and just everything that I’ve loved my whole life.”

Just not starring gluten.

Little Miss Sweets NYC

• Details: gluten-free bakery specializing in New York and Caribbean-inspired desserts, littlemisssweetsnyc.com
• Where to find: pre-packed individual items for sale (~$6.99) at local grocers — currently Tacoma Boys, H&L Produce in Lakewood, Thriftway in Stadium and Vashon, Untamed Coffee in Sumner, Rockridge Country Market in Enumclaw, Rain City Market in Renton
• Farmers Markets: Proctor every Saturday 9 a.m.-2 p.m., Puyallup sometimes — check Instagram for updates
• Pre-orders: whole cheesecakes and custom orders of any item, inquire online or by phone; pickup at My Commercial Kitchen, 3812 S. Wright Ave., Tacoma

This story was originally published August 14, 2025 at 5:15 AM.