Sweet family legacy continues in downtown Hot Springs
Mackenzie Simon, the owner of Fat Bottomed Girl’s Cupcake Shoppe at 502 Central Ave., is carrying on the sweet legacy of her family.
Her parents started the business in 2011 and she bought the company from them when she graduated from Lake Hamilton High School in 2015.
Charlene and Justin Simon, her parents, gave her the option of taking over the business or selling it.
“Well, they kind of sat me down. I had been working there since I was 13, all through high school, a little bit through junior high, and they sat me down and were like, we’re selling it. And it broke my heart just because I’ve been working there my whole life. And I was like, ‘No, I want to go to school for business.’ I wanted to go to college for business … and I was like, well, I’ve been working here, and I bought it from them,” Mackenzie Simon said.
The business was originally located in the 100 block of downtown Hot Springs and is now open at 502 Central Ave. Simon has six businesses in total — in addition to the cupcake store, she has Pour Some Sugar On Me Sweet Shoppe, FBG Bakehouse, Fat Bottomed Girl’s Fayetteville, which is closed due to COVID-19, Fat Bottomed Girl’s Puppy Bakery, 120 Central Ave., and Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Gift Shoppe.
“We used to be down where our puppy bakery is. The building is like over 100 years old, (with) beautiful hardwood floors,” Simon said.
“We started off in Hot Springs, but we started back among the 100 block of Hot Springs, and we changed that. It used to be the cupcake shop, (but) we changed it to the puppy bakery. So we’ll bake cupcakes for dogs and cats. Humans can eat it. They’re vegan and gluten-free. They’re our little miracle cupcakes,” she said.
In 2014, Simon’s parents appeared on “Cupcake Wars” on the Food Network.
“They flew all the way to Hollywood, and they competed with some of the world’s best bakeries. Even ‘till this day, we still keep our ‘Cupcake Wars’ flavors over at FBG,” she said.
“If you go down to the puppy bakery, their ‘Cupcake Wars’ episode is playing 24/7,” she said.
Simon said it takes “resilience and bouncing back from everything” to run a successful business, noting, “because every day something is going to be pushing you. A lot of late-night hours, kind of like a night owl. I would come and box 500 boxes of candy a night, kind of getting the store ready for the next day
… a lot of milkshakes. I have to have ice cream every single day; I don’t know what’s up.”
Simon said she was able to keep her businesses open during the pandemic.
“We really did have a choice; it’s so hard to get six businesses back up and running. It was dead, but we made it through. We made it through the end of last year like a boom happened, and we just got so busy again. So, we were dead for six months straight, did not see a soul and all of a sudden life was back into Hot Springs,” she said.
The business not only provides cupcakes and ice cream, but also 500 different styles of funny socks at Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Gift Shoppe.
At the Pour Some Sugar On Me Sweet Shoppe, they have 300 different flavors of candies from all over the world. They can do 32 flavors of ice cream and any flavor of milkshakes, lattes or smoothies.
At Fat Bottomed Girls, they deal with flavors of cupcakes, but they also do icing shots, and cup shakes where customers can pick their cupcake and milkshake flavors and combine them.