The tiny downtown Salem bakery behind those uncannily lifelike fruit pastries is about to get a lot more elbow room. Cat and Chad Sewell, the husband-and-wife team behind Sewell Sweets, plan to open a second storefront on the ground floor of the Modera Beaverton apartment building on Southwest Broadway in early 2027, giving their growing cake business room to breathe after years of working out of a cramped Salem shop.
The expansion, first reported by The Oregonian/OregonLive, marks a homecoming of sorts for the couple. Before Cat and Chad Sewell opened their original Sewell Sweets store in downtown Salem in 2022, they spent nine years running the business as a licensed private home kitchen based in Beaverton, delivering custom event cakes across Oregon and Washington, according to the bakery's own account of its history. Landing a storefront inside a brand-new Beaverton development effectively brings the business back to where it started.
Sewell Sweets specializes in custom cakes for weddings and similar events, a niche that earned it Editor's Choice for Best Cake in Oregon Bride magazine's Best of 2023 awards, cementing its reputation in the Pacific Northwest wedding industry. But it's the shop's mousse crunch pastries, designed to resemble fruit like mangoes or apples, that have made it a social media sensation, with customers regularly posting videos of themselves biting into the pastries' hardened shell to reveal a soft, sweet interior underneath. The confections are Sewell Sweets' take on trompe-l'œil, a French dessert style, or as the report from OregonLive notes of its literal translation, a technique meant to deceive the eye. The style was popularized globally by French pastry chef Cédric Grolet, who pioneered the hyperrealistic look using thin chocolate shells enclosing fruit mousse and compote, according to Reporter Gourmet.
A Tiny Shop Outgrows Its Space
Cat Sewell described the Salem storefront, located at 155 Liberty St. NE, as very tiny, with just a few two-person tables tucked into the space, per the report from OregonLive. The shop is open Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Beyond the mousse crunch pastries and custom cakes, the shop also sells a variety of other confections to keep customers coming back between big orders.
The space constraints pushed Sewell Sweets to shift its baking off-site, moving production from its small on-site kitchen to a separate commercial kitchen capable of producing more than the Salem store alone can sell. That capacity now supports wholesale relationships with the Marion Berries summer collegiate baseball team, Enchanted Forest amusement park, and various coffee shops and restaurants. The same scaling model has shown up elsewhere in the region: Beaverton-based Oyatsupan opened a 7,060-square-foot milk bread workshop in 2025 to expand its own wholesale output while keeping a small retail counter.
From a Middle School Project to a Regional Brand
Cat Sewell's cake ambitions date back to age 13, when she first conceived the idea for the business as part of a middle school project, according to Press Play Salem. She has spent two decades since developing scratch recipes with unusual flavor pairings, including lavender Earl Grey with lemon and honey rosemary fig, treating cake decorating as an art form that blends sculpting, painting, and culinary work. Cat Sewell told OregonLive that owning a cake shop has been everything I've wanted to get to, a sentiment that traces back to that early spark of an idea.
The Salem shop's rise wasn't without setbacks. In August 2023, the storefront's front window was shattered during an off-site bar fight, and local community members donated more than $3,000 via GoFundMe within 24 hours to help repair the damage and keep the shop open, according to the Salem Reporter. Around the same period, Cat and Chad Sewell submitted formal testimony to the Oregon Legislature detailing open drug use and safety concerns outside their storefront, part of a broader wave of business owner feedback during state debates over Measure 110 drug decriminalization that preceded lawmakers voting in 2024 to re-criminalize minor drug possession.
Beaverton's New Home for Dessert Shops
The Beaverton storefront will have tons of seating space, a marked upgrade from Salem's handful of two-person tables. It's set inside Modera Beaverton, a 312-unit mixed-use apartment complex developed by Mill Creek Residential Trust that officially opened in March 2025 with 4,145 square feet of ground-floor retail space built for walk-in commercial tenants, according to the Beaverton Valley Times.
The move fits into a broader municipal push to turn downtown Beaverton into a food and dessert destination. The city's 2023 Housing Needs Analysis projects Beaverton will grow by more than 19,000 residents between 2022 and 2042, requiring roughly 9,900 new housing units and fueling the kind of mixed-use transit development that Modera represents. Downtown redevelopment officials have already courted other regional dessert brands for similar ground-floor space, including a 1,008-square-foot lease approved in early 2026 for Portland-based South Asian ice cream maker Kulfi in the Beaverton Central garage. Cat and Chad Sewell now hope to have their own Beaverton location up and running in early 2027, bringing the mousse crunch pastries — and a lot more seating — to a city where their bakery business first began.
