By Kalena Reynolds | Staff Writer
Between traveling to almost 30 countries and opening her own business at 23, Adeline Camarena has combined her passion for baking with her love of travel in her coffee and dessert shop, Around The World.
Camarena’s parents worked in the restaurant business, and eventually, they opened their own business in Hillsboro, where she began waitressing around the age of 12. Utilizing that work experience, she did culinary work throughout high school and then graduated with her associate’s degree in culinary at Texas State Technical College.
After college, Camarena took a few years off to travel and experience new cultures.
“I kind of stopped for two years, decided to travel, fell in love with traveling, and then in one of my returns, when I returned from Spain, I decided I wanted to move spontaneously to another state,” Camarena said. “So I moved to Indiana.”
While living in Indiana, Camarena worked as the only employee at a food hall for seven months. This experience ultimately inspired her to consider starting her own business.
“I was, like, ‘imagine if you could create a business and actually put effort into it and pour all of yourself and who you are and what you love,'” Camarena said. “So I came back kind of with the idea of, I want my own business, yet I still don’t have set in stone what I wanted to do.”
Camarena took her inspiration to the drawing board and began experimenting with different recipes. Once she finalized her menu, she began looking at locations.
Deciding on a space in Union Hall, Camarena began working to piece together every element needed for crafting a pop-up section of her business to spread the word about her desserts to the community,
“I was also doing pop-ups at different events,” Camarena said. “So people would invite me to their shops or different things like Black Daisy, and White Elephant when it was still here. So I did a lot of pop-ups trying to get known, trying to get out there a little bit.”
While Camarena opened her location in Union Hall during the peak of COVID-19 in April 2020, she stayed open for a little less than two years and began looking for a new space at the end of her contract. What was expected to take three months became a two-year journey of permitting, construction, and design—forcing Camarena to take charge and learn many tasks herself.
“At the end, I jumped in,” Camarena said. “I started doing everything, contracting people by directly arguing with people, calling the city, just pretty much everything by myself. Finally, it opened within three months of me jumping in.”
Amanda Jett, a long-time friend and employee, has worked alongside Camarena since she was a senior in high school. Jett has seen the growth in Camarena’s business and witnessed the journey of Camarena’s travels and how they impacted her baking.
“It’s been awesome to see people get excited about stuff they haven’t even heard about and when we explain it to them, they are bewildered and they can’t wait to try those items,” Jett said.
While February will officially mark the shop’s first anniversary, Camarena has continued to travel and explore new cultures to bring more international delicacies to Waco.
“With my desserts, I do try to be as authentic as the place as possible,” Camarena said. “I don’t try to Americanize it at all, or as least as possible, just so it has that flavor of authenticity for whoever has had the authentic thing before, or is from those places. So I do a lot of research, a lot of recipe testing and perfecting. Or I put several recipes together that are very similar, and I try to do the techniques as authentic, like the tiramisu.”
When Camarena began crafting her tiramisu recipe, she found that the only authentic recipe videos were only available in Italian. Although Camarena does not speak Italian, she studied the videos intensely to master the techniques and learn the ingredients they were using.
Camarena also has a multitude of desserts inspired by her travels to Canada, Brazil and Hungary.
“I brought back one from Hungary, which is a dobos torte,” Camarena said. “It’s a Hungarian cake. So it’s a sponge with six layers of sponge cake. They’re layered with a chocolate buttercream, per se, but it’s a little different method on how to make it. It’s literally layers of sponge cake and chocolate buttercream. On the outer side, it has crushed hazelnuts with crushed caramel. And then on the last layer of the sponge cake, you add that caramel on top, so it’s caramel on top of the piece of cake.”
Camarena also wanted to ensure that her menu included multiple keto, gluten-free and sugar-free items, such as key lime pies, peanut butter chocolate pies, blueberry cream pies and banana pudding. Aside from desserts, Around The World also serves a variety of signature drinks from various countries, such as Brazil, Mexico, England, India and Japan.
While Camarena continues her travels and expansion of her menu, she wants to ensure her customers feel her love and appreciation of culture when visiting the shop.
“I just want people to try different things and experiences because not everybody gets to travel,” Camarena said. “Not everybody likes to travel. So to come here, which is like, maybe a few minutes away… and get to experience something different than your typical bakeries.”
Around the World is located at 119 N 12th St. Their store hours can be found here.
