What is Sweet Dee’s Bakeshop?
The east end of Stetson Drive is better known for what happens after midnight. Sweet Dee’s Bakeshop runs on the opposite clock. It’s a bright, French-inspired bakery and café at 7350 E Stetson Dr, on the ground floor of the Camden apartments under a big scalloped awning, and most days it’s done by 2 p.m.
The shop belongs to a mother-daughter team, Lynda and Danielle O’Day. Danielle, the “Sweet Dee” of the name, is self-taught and started out baking specialty cakes at home. When the orders outgrew the kitchen, the two opened the shop in June 2018. Since then Danielle has been named a featured chef at the James Beard Foundation’s 2019 Phoenix gala dinner, by the bakery’s account, and has competed on Food Network’s Chopped Sweets.
The draw is a pastry case that changes with the calendar. One Easter brought cold brew served inside a chocolate bunny. St. Patrick’s week turns the case green. There have been Taylor Swift weekends and Star Wars days. Underneath the novelty is a serious gluten-free, dairy-free and vegan program; Phoenix New Times named Sweet Dee’s its Best Gluten-Free Bakery in 2018 and again in 2021. The signature item is Dee’s Nuts, miniature baked donuts made mostly from almond flour, honey and eggs.
It’s also a breakfast and lunch café with a full coffee bar, which makes it one of the few places on this stretch of Stetson where you can sit down in daylight with a latte and a sandwich.
How to visit
Go early, and not on Monday. Sweet Dee’s opens at 7 a.m. Tuesday through Friday and 8 a.m. on weekends, and it’s closed Mondays. The kitchen stops at 2 p.m. every day; Thursday and Friday the shop stays open until 4 for coffee and pastry. Weekday mornings are calm; weekend late mornings are when the line builds.
Order from the case and the coffee bar together. Start with Dee’s Nuts and whatever the seasonal case is built around that week. Then order a latte: the bakery makes its coffee syrups in house, along with its cold foams and the mini cookie that sits on top of the cup. The café menu adds scratch buttermilk biscuits, sandwiches with house-roasted, hand-carved turkey, and house sauces and dressings.
Pre-order anything that matters. Custom cakes and corporate orders are quoted by phone or message. Holiday windows for Thanksgiving pies, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day and Easter open and close quickly, and pre-ordering is the way to skip the pickup-day line.
Pair it with the neighborhood. Sweet Dee’s is a short walk from Scottsdale Fashion Square and the Waterfront, and an easy breakfast before a morning on Old Town on foot. For more coffee options, see our coffee shop guide; for a later start, our brunch guide.
A daytime business on a nighttime street
Stetson Drive’s eastern blocks have spent three decades as Scottsdale’s nightlife core, from Martini Ranch in 1994 to the clubs and lounges of the Entertainment District. What has softened the street is housing. Apartment buildings like the Camden put residents on blocks that had mostly been bars and parking, and residents want things that open at 7 a.m.
Sweet Dee’s arrived in 2018 to serve them, and it’s become one of the street’s daytime anchors. The reasons it lasted are mostly specific: a gluten-free and vegan program strong enough to win city-wide awards twice, a custom-cake business that doesn’t depend on foot traffic, and a habit of reinventing the pastry case every few weeks so regulars have a reason to come back. Pastry Arts Magazine’s 2023 profile, written at the shop’s five-year mark, singled out exactly that mix of novelty and craft.
It also belongs to a long line of independent Old Town sweet shops, a tradition that runs from the Sugar Bowl, serving ice cream on Scottsdale Road since the 1950s, to newer cake specialists like Ruze Cake House. Sweet Dee’s niche within that tradition is the allergy-friendly case and the themed weekend.
The honest assessment: the seasonal theming can tip into sugar overload, and seating inside is limited. But for a family-run bakery that has built a following on a street designed for nightlife, Sweet Dee’s has done something unusual, and it’s done it before 2 p.m.