Baked and Wired and a Baked Joint, sister locations, are two of the most loved spots in the city. Known around DC for their cakey and delicious cupcakes, they have a fantastic coffee program, beautifully made bread, sandwiches, salads, and everything in between.

Baked and Wired, the original location, sits tucked away in Georgetown off the main “M” street, backed up next to the old canal that dates back over 100 years. The building itself is tiny, essentially a dated colonial style house, with an architecture firm on the second floor and Baked and Wired on the first floor. Inside, there is a long marble counter running about 15 feet where all the baked goods sit, everything from their legendary cupcakes to bread, homemade granola, and cookies. On the right, when you walk in, there is a beautiful small coffee bar, with bags of coffee from around the country, featuring a rotating selection of handpicked espresso and single origin coffee. If you wander into the back you will find a communal table and worn oriental carpets, giving a living room feeling to the space, but it wasn't always like this. Teresa (the founder of Baked and Wired) moved into this space with a completely different vision creating a copy and print store called Zap. Over the years Zap gradually transformed into the beloved Baked and Wired.

Teresa is still working 90 hour weeks, 20 years since starting Baked and Wired. She is one of the rare owners who is as involved now as she was early on, still mopping floors, running payroll, and teaching her team on the floor. Despite needing to cross a million things off her to do list, she was kind enough to sit down with us for an hour to have a cortado, tell us how she got started, the challenges she faced, and what it means to run a family business.

 Photo Credit: Sarah Culver

How did Baked and Wired get started?

My husband is a professional architect and works in the second floor of a townhouse in Georgetown, which looks very different now! In the 80s, I realized the neighborhood was missing a copy store. We opened a place on the ground floor of my husband's architecture firm, and named it Zap, Copies and Communications. It was more or less a Kinko's. I got pregnant shortly after opening the store so our son Zak was essentially raised in Zaps. We had a playpen in the office and just kind of kept on going. As technology evolved, the need for paper started to decline and we knew we had to do something differently. It was really one of those things where you're like now what do I do? Also, our kids were in private school, and we had to figure out how to pay for it.

My husband and I were really inspired by the coffee bars in San Francisco. We spoke about opening up one back home because there was nothing really like that in our neighborhood. We decided to test out the concept by physically splitting up Zaps. One section was for Zaps and the other section was this bakery-coffee house concept. I would jump over to the Zap side and help with copies then run back behind the coffee counter and pull shots of espresso. Once the work day was over, I would either go home or run to one of my kid's lacrosse games, make dinner and then start baking for the next day. It was very little sleep. It was a hectic time, but this method worked because Zap's paid for all of the expenses of the bakery-coffee house, which gave us the freedom to really develop what is now Baked and Wired.

How did you scale the bakery?

Originally, I was doing all the baking at home, but it got to be too much, so we bought the house next door and turned that into a working kitchen. It was a shoebox Victorian-styled house, but it was actually more cost efficient than buying or renting a professional kitchen because our volume wasn't large enough. It was also convenient for me because I was right next door to home so I could still make dinner, put the kids to bed, and then at 2AM go next door to finish all the baking for the next day.

We were there for a while before moving to an industrial space.

Baked and Wired is known for its cupcakes. What’s your favorite cupcake?

I would say there's two, but a mainstay that's always there is the carrot which was my great aunt Helen's recipe and then my second would be the Texas sheet cake. The Texas sheet cake is something you always have at family gatherings because you actually just pour it in a sheet pan. I just made that into a cupcake form.

Photo Credit: Sarah Culver

How did Baked and Wired become known for cupcakes?

I never intended for that to happen, and I didn't even want to make cupcakes when starting out. Back when the space was still divided between Zap and the coffee-bakery house, we were completely carry out. I was having trouble finding a hard container to put a slice of cake in because the icing got everywhere, so I decided to just make them into a cupcake. Looking back, there wasn't really anyone making cupcakes in DC at the time.

You have a small retail section where you feature other brands, tell me about that!

Our son, Zak, and my husband are always on the lookout for unique products. If we have the shelf space and they see a product they like, it's a no-brainer. I mean you're making money doing virtually nothing except keeping your shelf stocked.

One more question for you, since I think it’s a unique approach, you’re a family run business, I’d love to hear about that.

We’ve always been a family business. My daughter Tessa is our Operations Director and my son Zak runs our entire coffee program, makes all of our milks in house, runs the retail and a bunch of other things.

For Tessa, she is a super hustler, and has a business called “Yes Babe” where she does these incredible parties that engage people with food but also with music and getting to know each other. She also runs her own Substack Sobremesa.

(Author Note: Highly recommend you check it out, there are some fantastic recipes in here).

It's been a family affair since we started. My kids our now the owners, under the pretense that we weren't holding them hostage to this business. At the end of the day, as parents, we wanted to give them this opportunity and also the freedom to do other things with their lives, but they both elected to stay involved!