by Chris Jay
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It was the first hot afternoon of 2020, and the section of Lakeshore Drive between I-49 and Bilberry Park was starkly lit by a wide, bright sunbeam that had managed to slip out between rolling thunderheads. Pollen clung to everything and everyone.
I was on my way to visit Nicholas Maywether, a 38-year-old baker and drag performer whose excellent pound cake will be featured as the dessert course during Chef Hardette Harris’s “Made Up North” event for 318 Restaurant Week on Tuesday, March 17, 2020. Full disclosure: I am an employee of the Shreveport-Bossier Convention and Tourist Bureau, organizers of 318 Restaurant Week. I am not, however, under any obligation to write this article, nor am I being compensated to do so.
Nicholas Maywether owns Daliscious Bakery, a small, home-based business with a dedicated clientele. Shortly after I arrived at his home, a pink cottage on a quiet block in Lakeshore, he proudly handed me a stack of his new business cards. The card reads: Simple cakes, cobbler and cookies. But anyone who has eaten Nicholas’s baked goods knows that there is nothing simple about the level of perfection that he’s reached in his study of baked goods. His pound cake is the very best that I have ever tasted. His peanut butter bars, peanut butter sheet cakes, tea cakes and honeybun cakes are legendary among friends and neighbors.
And it’s been this way for as long as Nicholas can remember.
“I’ve been making honeybun cakes for…about 20 years,” Nicholas told me in an expressive, singsong voice that seems to wrap itself around words and make them more beautiful. “Every holiday, every Thanksgiving and Christmas: ‘Nick, are you making honeybun cake?’ ‘Yeah, isn’t there something else y’all want other than honeybun cake?’ One year, I slid a peanut butter cake in. My God, that peanut butter cake was good.”
Nicholas has always been a cook, but his love of baking emerged one summer at vacation bible school. The summer’s programs concluded with a bake-off. Nicholas’s cream cheese pound cake placed second. Decades later, he remains clearly agitated by the outcome. (“She had a butter pecan cake, I’ll never forget. Over my cream cheese pound cake? I was like ‘Really?’”)
Whenever he’s invited to a gathering, Nicholas knows that there’s an ask coming.
“I’ll say, ‘Is there something I need to cook?’ ‘Well, you could bring a peanut butter cake.’”
The secret to his peanut butter cake, which he is comfortable sharing, was passed down from his beloved grandmother, a lifelong professional cook named Earline Richardson. The icing consists of powdered sugar, PET milk, a stick of butter, half a cup of peanut butter, a little milk and “a couple tablespoons” of Sunny Delight. The Sunny Delight, Nicholas says, balances the peanut butter.
Though his grandmother now struggles with dementia, she remains sharp enough to enjoy good cooking. She loves the fried catfish and tartar sauce at Chef Hardette Harris’s Us Up North Kitchen in Allendale, where many of the baked desserts are Nicholas’s.
“Even with dementia, she knows me and she knows that I make good cakes,” Nicholas told me. “She said ‘I remember you telling your mother that you would keep her legacy alive. And you have done that, boy, and I’m so proud of you. I’m about to cry now, thinking about it.”
For his pound cake recipe, Nicholas slightly adjusted a recipe passed down by his Aunt Debbie.
“I have to measure ingredients but Debbie can take flour, sugar, butter and just throw them in and not measure anything and still make a good cake,” Nicholas said. “The pound cake recipe that I have is actually hers, but I added one flavor, so it’s mine now. But, if I ever write it down, it’ll be called Aunt Debbie’s pound cake.”
Nicholas would love to have his own bakery one day, though he admits feeling some anxiety about failure. (“I really want a bakery but it’s so crazy here in Louisiana that I’m afraid I wouldn’t succeed. Well, I know I will succeed but I’m still afraid that I won’t.”)
His aspirations are not limited to owning a bakery. In another part of his life, as Nikita Eman, he just wants to slay the other bitches at Central.
“I’m just a regular old showgirl,” he said. “I just perform on talent nights at Central Station. My name used to be Nickalicious, but that name was kinda like…so, I thought: Nikita Iman. Iman comes from my gay dad.”
There’s a pause between us for a moment. Wind chimes shimmer outside of the open kitchen window.
“If a gay person can’t go to their biological family, they can go to their gay family for that same type of love and closeness,” Nicholas said. “People say I’m motherly, but I can’t help it. You need a place to stay, you can come lay your head. You need a meal, I’ll cook. But I’m going to leave you with some knowledge, too, some wisdom about how to be safe out here in these streets. If you couldn’t get it at home, you should be able to get it somewhere else.”
All of the parts of Nicholas Maywether aren’t separate like eggs and flour and butter. The grandma’s boy who sings in the church choir, the aspiring bakery owner, the showgirl at Central Station—they’re all the same person. They’ve been whisked together for some time and poured into a form.
Now they’re rising.
To order cakes, cobblers, cookies or sugar-free desserts from Daliscious Bakery, call (318) 946-1889. To see Nikita Iman perform, be at Central Station at 10 p.m. on Friday nights.
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