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By MEG HERNDON | Staff Writer

CALERA – Creations Galore and Moore, a Calera-based bakery, was announced to be a finalist for the Alabama Small Business Awards presented in partnership between the Chamber of Commerce Association of Alabama (CCAA) and the Business Council of Alabama (BCA).

Nedra Moore, the founder and owner of Creations Galore and Moore, said that she was shocked when she heard the news.

“I didn’t even know that I had been nominated to even become a finalist, so that was super, super exciting,” Moore said.

Moore later found out that the Shelby County Chamber nominated her. The Chamber nominates the recipient of the Shelby County Business of the Year Award and Creations Galore and Moore won the title in 2021.

The Alabama Small Business Awards are presented annually and recognize the very best Alabama small businesses.

In 2021, 45 small businesses from throughout the state were named finalists across four categories: Emerging, 1-10 Employees, 11-50 employees and 51-100 employees. Creations Galore and Moore is one of the 12 finalists in the Emerging category.

Nominees were judged in four categories: community involvement, chamber participation, business success and overall deservedness.

The finalists are judged on a variety of civic and professional standards with the winners considered to be the state’s very best small businesses.

With a successful start to her business despite opening during a pandemic and immaculately detailed cakes, it might be apparent that Moore was destined to be a baker. But the path that lead Moore into opening her bakery was not conventional.

“I have no formal training, I did not go to school for this, I was sitting at a computer running scripts and writing scripts and code, that’s what I was doing for a living,” Moore said.

Moore received her degree in Network Engineering and says that baking cakes is something she “fell into.”

While working her IT job, Moore would make cakes for family and friends, then by word of mouth, her business began to grow.
“It just got the point where I had to make a decision if I was going to continue in my career or if I was going to step out and do something new,” Moore said. “And so with the support of my husband, we just stepped out on faith and I started doing cakes full time in June of 2014.”

Take one look at any of Moore’s cakes and it’s obvious that she obsesses over details. Moore explained that her grandmother was a stickler on the idea that no matter how good food is, it doesn’t matter unless it looks good.

The importance of detail and presentation stuck with her and was only magnified when she would write scripts and code at her IT job.

“It helped train my eye for detail because in programming if one character is off, it could throw the whole thing off,” Moore said. “So I guess that’s just my way of being able to combine my career at that time with what I do here.”

But it is not just the process of making the cakes that she enjoys, although she does love helping make people’s ideas come to life, she also loves watching people enjoy their food.

“It just seems like, people are really happy when they eat,” Moore said. “It’s not very often when you see someone frowning unless their food isn’t good. But usually, food brings happiness. And wherever food is, I feel like that’s where happiness resides.”

Moore was a registered baker for some time before she decided to open her brick-and-mortar bakery in Calera.

“Through a lot of prayer and reflection we decided that it would be best to continue to move forward and once again step out on faith,” Moore said. “You know it didn’t make sense when I left my career the first time, it didn’t make sense to anybody.

“But he brought us so far and then, here we come to this juncture again, and it’s like you know what, he didn’t bring us this far to leave us. He would have never presented this opportunity for us if it wasn’t meant for us to keep going. So that’s what we did, we just kept going.”

As an Alabaster resident herself, Moore decided to open her store in Calera because of the community she was met with when looking at locations.

“When we came through Calera it’s just, the community, the location, everything just felt right,” Moore said. “And then the support that we got when we even showed that we had interest in this location, I don’t feel like we would’ve gotten that anywhere else.”

Calera welcomed Moore with open arms as they were excited to see progress and growth in the area, Moore explained, and it’s been that way ever since.

Creations Galore and Moore changes its menu regularly to keep things fresh. Custom cupcakes, freshly made cinnamon rolls, brownies, mini cheesecakes, ice cream, milkshakes, ice cream sandwiches, brookies and waffle splits can be bought in store.

The winners of the Small Business Awards will be announced at the CCAA annual meeting luncheon on Thursday, Dec. 2 at the Harbert Center in Birmingham.

Contact Creations Galore and Moore about making a custom cake on its website, Creationsgaloreandmoore.com, through the order form tab, or contact the store by calling 205-690-8399.

Creations Galore and Moore are located at 8261 Hwy 31 Calera AL and open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m.-6 p.m.