Abby Jimenez is renowned for her romance novels, a number of which have become bestsellers. Her seventh book, “Say You’ll Remember Me,” is being released Tuesday.
But, prior to becoming an author, the Twin Cities resident gained fame as a baker. She has appeared on cooking shows, such as TLC’s “Fabulous Cakes” and the Food Network’s “Cupcake Wars.”
Jimenez’s local fans can get their fill of their idol at her Nadia Cakes cupcake shops in Maple Grove and Woodbury. Coffee is on tap. Specialty cupcakes such as Unicorn Poop (a tradition for April Fools) are at the ready. Stacks of her books — signed, of course — are available for purchase.
And her social media? It’s a hoot. Place a special order for her vagina-shaped cake, which has quite a viral backstory.
Jimenez, 45, says she is living her dream, married to her one true love — we’ll call the shy guy Mr. Jimenez — who is her business partner and upon which the men in her novels are, to one degree or another, based.
A bakery is born
The couple met at Express, the clothing retailer where both worked as high-volume store managers in California.
Jimenez was pregnant with her third child in 2007 when she lost her job and, at about the same time, her beloved day care arrangement went by the wayside. “It was kind of a shocking situation to be in, all of a sudden,” she said. “I was depressed. I was devastated.”
In what would be a decisive life’s moment, Jimenez signed up for cake-decorating classes at her local Michaels for several months. She figured she could sell cakes out of her home, even with her young children getting their paws into the ingredients. In 2007, Nadia Cakes (the nickname of her second daughter) was born.
“I would do by myself what now takes four full-time people to do,” she said. “I baked every cake. I decorated every cake. I did every consultation. I did all the billing. I did everything. All the deliveries.”
She developed a case of carpal tunnel syndrome so nasty it required surgery, so Mr. Jimenez suggested they open a proper bakery with a full staff … but they had no money. So, in what she calls a “banana pants” move, they put $125,000 on credit card checks with no interest for a year.
“We were so cash-poor that we didn’t even have enough in the register to make change. It was very, very, very scary,” she said.
The gamble paid off.
“The day we opened (in 2009), we opened to immediate success,” she said. “All the people who came to order cakes out of my house showed up and supported the business. And within three weeks of Nadia Cakes opening, my husband quit his full-time job to become CFO of our business.”
Jimenez did a good job of putting her store on the map, so calls from pastry-related reality shows, such as TLC’s “Fabulous Cakes” and the Food Network’s “Cupcake Wars,” began to roll in. Jimenez, her staff and her store were suddenly, collectively, TV stars.
“Fabulous Cakes” had a relaxed documentary-style format that “wasn’t as popular but it was a lot more fun to do,” Jimenez said. “Cupcake Wars” is a competition show; that’s more stressful.
She told a camera at the time, “I am an extremely competitive person. I will run through that kitchen and do whatever it takes. I will not stop until I win ‘Cupcake Wars.’”
In 2011, she did.
Minnesota-bound
The Jimenezes were starting to plan where to put their kids in schools — and it was looking like California wouldn’t be it.
“We were also looking at other, you know, places to open up bakeries,” she said. “And we just kind of realized we didn’t want to do it in California. It’s really expensive to have a business in California. And so we thought: ‘You know what? Let’s take a five-week cross-country trip to see if there’s any other place that we want to live.’
“That’s how we found Minnesota.”
After setting up her Maple Grove store in 2011 and the Woodbury one in 2013, she took up the second of her major hobbies: writing. Her first book-length project, a dystopian young-adult novel, flopped in her online writers group, but a rom-com was a hit. Egged on by the other group members, she began hunting for an agent.
Her manuscript would eventually become the popular “The Happy Ever Playlist.” (Another of her novels, “The Friend Zone,” would end up being published first.)
RELATED: Abby Jimenez’s romance novels, as ranked by our reader
“Rom-coms are so much easier to write because they are set in the real world,” Jimenez said.
“Romance exists in the folds of everyday life,” she said. “You know, like Sloan in ‘Happy Ever’ is dealing with complicated grief” when she meets Jason — or, more precisely, Jason’s dog, who tumbles through her car’s sunroof. Jason has issues of his own.
Alexis in “Part of Your World” is suffering mental and emotional abuse from her ex while trying to nurture a relationship with a man in a far-off town.
“Of course, I did a ton of research on domestic violence,” Jimenez said. “And I asked in my reader group if there were any domestic violence advocates or survivors who could help advise me on the book. I had them read copies as I wrote them.”
Brianna of “Yours Truly” has another problem — Her brother is desperately in need of a kidney transplant with dim prospects of ever obtaining one.
Jimenez ripped this topic from her own life. In 2020, her hair started falling out. She was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that was attacking her kidneys. She is now in remission, but remembers “the very real possibility that I might, at some point in my life, need a transplant. It was a terrifying time.”
Readers seem to like Jimenez’s authenticity. “Part of Your World” was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller in 2024. “Life’s too Short” won the 2022 Minnesota Book Award for genre fiction.
Going viral
When her agent took her on, she instructed Jimenez to set up public personal social media profiles to promote her books.
“I’m a private person, so I very reluctantly signed up for “authorabbyjimenez” profiles on Facebook, Instagram and X. And, you know, I didn’t have too many followers out of the gate.
“But then the vageode thing happened.”
A Nadia Cakes geode rock cake with pink frosting and a gash of rock candy down the side went viral in January 2018 because it looked an awful lot like a vagina.
When messages began coming in, social media manager Jimenez had choices. She could have hurriedly pulled the product or deleted the messages. Instead, she faced the social-media storm head-on.
“Instead of being offended by what everybody was saying or just deleting the post, I engaged with and was laughing with them and using that to sell my product,” she said.
The message thread with Jimenez’s memorable posts is still available on Facebook.
The vageode fuss “had a tangible effect on my book sales” even though it didn’t take place on her personal Facebook account. “It definitely did.”
Her social media use took a significant turn in 2021, when she joined TikTok and, counterintuitively, reduced mentions of her books to a trickle (she kept the book promos on full blast on her other channels).
Instead, TikTok is where she now nurtures a reader community focused largely on hijinks in her household — often including Stuntman Mike, Tess and her two other dogs, along with her daughter Maya, who plays 15 musical instruments and delights in sparring with mom (one such video has logged more than 1 million views).
Mr. Jimenez is media-shy but makes cameos.
His moustachioed appearance lakeside to bring his wife tacos made her fans swoon.
“Every man that I write into my romance novels is one part that man,” she said on the video. “They do exist.”
In another video, Mr. Jimenez had a bit of fun with the vasectomy he had just undergone. Pictures show him with an animal cone around his head and a “this stud has been retired” sign hanging from his neck.
“I love that man,” Jimenez murmured on the video.
At a California airport one day, she had “the coolest reader interaction story I have probably ever had.” Her husband happened to spot a young passenger with a cool backpack.
The girl turned around, saw her and gasped, Jimenez said. They were both bound for a romance book conference. The girl’s birthday was the next day. It felt like a birthday for Jimenez, too, because the girl had two of her books in that bag, and she was able to sign the novels and take pictures.
Another such chance encounter in an airport concourse made her “want to cry, ‘that was so cool,’” she said. “I think I was as excited to meet her as she was excited to meet me.”
Jimenez has become TikTok-notorious so many times, in so many venues, that she has had to assemble connect-the-dots videos for her viewers so they can grasp the scope of her personal and professional personas.
Her new book
Jimenez’s new novel, “Say You’ll Remember Me,” partly focuses on a veterinarian, Xavier, who is struggling to keep a financially troubled clinic afloat. The other protagonist, Samantha, is caring for her mother, who has advanced Alzheimer’s disease.
Xavier and Samantha are fighting to keep a long-distance relationship alive. Every Abby Jimenez book throws up dire circumstances in love’s way, but X. and Sam seem to get double or triple the trouble.
The book cover, showing a happy couple on a beach accompanied by a dog with a stick in its mouth, seems cheerily dissonant.
That’s intentional, Jimenez explained in a TikTok about an earlier, similarly discordant cover.
“Every one of my books is going to have a cartoon-y cover and a completely tear-you-to-pieces inside. But, did I or did I not make you whole at the end? Are you not smiling, are you not happy in love with these characters laughing and crying happy tears at the end of this book? Yes, you are. I will keep doing what I do.
“You will be on the beach sobbing into your mimosa, just the way I like it.”
Source: Paradise Post
