Stephen Montoya
From the left, Curtis R. Nash Jr. and his mom Grace Nash-Newton display two out of 26 styles of cupcakes made daily at the Grace’s Tiers Bakery in North Richland Hills.
When local baker Grace Nash-Newton was young she knew emphatically what she wanted to do for a career. The irony is it didn’t have anything to do with baking. In fact, her area of interest was the medical field, more specifically she had the desire to become a doctor. But much like the biblical figure of Jonah, she took the long way around to end up where she says she was destined to be. Today, Nash-Newton can be found working alongside her son, Curtis R. Nash Jr., at their family-run bakery Grace’s Tiers located at 7901 Mid Cities Blvd. Suite 212 in the North Richland Hills area.
This mother and son duo have been cranking up the heat for nearly years in this swanky locale, on the southeast end of a modern strip mall. This full-scale bakery specializes in creating custom cakes, cookies, pies, cupcakes and more. To keep with the growing health trend Grace’s Tiers also offers vegan, sugar-free, keto and gluten-friendly confections. On any given day, this mother and son team create 26 options of cupcakes that span the flavor spectrum.
These sweet cake offerings are made in house — even the frosting — and separated by flavors. One side of the bakery has a specialty cabinet, while the other side hosts classic cupcake flavors like red velvet with butter cream frosting. And, if it’s your birthday, Curtis — better known as Nash — will even serenade you with a rendition of the ever popular “Happy Birthday” song played on his saxophone.
Sounds fun right?
On the flip side of this bakery’s story is a tale of perseverance and woe. But no matter what obstacles where thrown at Nash-Newton and her family over the years, she says she’s always found a way to move forward with hope. This is where the play on words for her and her son’s business come from. Grace’s Tiers have replaced her real tears in her years long journey to opening her own storefront.
“I was headed to go to college at Texas A&M and had a full ride to go [because] I wanted to be a doctor,” Nash-Newton says. “This is about the same time I found out I was pregnant. So, I went to medical assistance school because I just wanted to do something medical.”
Nash-Newton says she attended the now closed Bryan Institute in Arlington, where she graduated and eventually taught. To add to her life’s journey, she also had another son during this era giving her an added sense of responsibility.
Stephen Montoya
“I knew with two children I’m never going to go to college and be a doctor, so I just dove headfirst into the medical assisting career. Post-graduation, Nash-Newton says she taught medical assisting, coding and billing for 20 years there. In the coming years, after her stint as a teacher in the medical assisting field, Nash-Newton taught at a Catholic school, another medical assisting school in North Carolina, and then eventually changed careers completely.
“I got a call based on my resume asking me if I’d like to be a trainer for a software company. They asked if I liked to travel and I was like, ‘yeah,’” she says. “I have been to every state except to Alaska and Maine due to this job.”
On top of her career changes, Nash-Newton verified that her family life had also been through its fair share of changes. To add to her already busy workload, Nash-Newton says her first husband met with an untimely death as well as all of her siblings. She had also been in two car accidents that left her with severe neck pain, which she eventually tried to alleviate with surgery.
“[In] 2019, I'm not working, I'm very depressed … just in a very dark place. I remember I cried all the time. [I was] just really sad. Then one day while I was watching TV I was like, ‘I'm going to bake a cake.’ I didn't know that this was going to make me happy.”
Nash-Newton says the whole time she was baking she never once thought about her pain or her lost loved ones. “When I finished it and it was pretty, it made me even happier,” she says. “So, I started baking just to keep happy.”
After several bakes, Nash-Newton says she wanted to see if she could possibly make some money out of her newfound passion.
Stephen Montoya
“So, then I started marketing myself on Facebook and saying I was offering cakes for sale and people started buying them,” she says.
Her next challenge would come in the form of a big project a local realtor asked Nash-Newton to complete for his wife’s 40th birthday. The request was to create a three tier Louis Vuitton-style cake.
“Now, I've never worked with fondant before, but somehow I figured it out,” she says. It took me three days to do this cake and everything on the cake is edible except the topper. I made every zipper, I made every button, [and] I painted everything. I did what I had to do and when I finished, I was like, oh my goodness, I can do this.”
Stephen Montoya
Fresh off of a creative high, Nash-Newton began collecting and buying as many cake pans, frosting bags, and molds to help boost her home baking knowledge. “I have never gone to school for baking, I have no culinary school background. Everything I know, I taught myself or learned from the ‘Cake Boss,’” she says. “That's my favorite show.”
Nash-Newton says she would challenge herself to learn any and all of the recipes presented on “Cake Boss” kind of like a makeshift baking lesson. As she was learning, her home business began to blow up too. Soon after the Louis Vuitton bag cake, word of mouth spread, leaving Nash-Newton little time to feel sad.
“One Saturday, I remember baking 17 cakes in one oven,” she says with disbelief. “At that point, I was like, ‘I got to find a building.’”
With the support of her husband and son, Nash-Newton says she was able to make her dream a reality eventually opening up Grace’s Tiers in May of 2022. Today, Nash-Newton is in her happy place, baking goodies and making custom confections right beside her son. She’s even come up with the slogan “Let us bake you happy.”
“I’ve always wanted to make people happy or to do something to put a smile on somebody's face,” she says. “When I see a grown man or a grown woman cry, when they see their cake that does something to me. Or a kid who has a big smile on their face when they see their cake, it's like no other reward ever.”
