Alexis Ruddock: How Sweet It Is

How Sweet It Is

From a Filipino brothel to the Food Network, one woman perseveres to savor pastry success

By Shilo Urban

Alexis Ruddock turns flour and sugar into works of art, crafting flawless cupcakes and cookies with adorable decorations. Dainty pink flowers and teeny-tiny succulents bloom on her desserts. Swirls of frosting find new lives as snowy cabins and pretty springtime forests. It’s a world of happy unicorns and rainbows, of candy sprinkles and cake pops that are (almost) too cute to eat.

A self-taught chef and mother of two, Alexis runs the award-winning organic bakery Sweet Frosted Confections from her home in Aledo. She has appeared on Food Network multiple times. Her delicious treats attract an impressive clientele, from Pepsi and Microsoft to the Texas Rangers and Fort Worth Zoo. She teaches cookie decorating at corporate team-building events and has shipped her in-demand sweets around the planet.

But her path to success has not all been strewn with fondant blossoms and roses. Raised in a brothel in the Philippines, she has survived abandonment and abuse on a roller-coaster journey that has swung from driving a Porsche to living in her car. She has picked herself up again and again to overcome challenges and create a better life for her family.

As a child, Alexis thought her home was normal. Until she was 7 years old, she lived with her parents and sister in a windowless room under the stairs of a large “hotel” called Fountain of Youth. Many young women lived in the building as well. Alexis watched them style their hair and makeup, donning skimpy outfits and red hearts with numbers on them. She played hide-and-seek with her cousins in the bedrooms that lined the long hallways; there were dozens to choose from.

But her favorite was the Cupid Room, whose heart-shaped decor and mirrors charmed the little girl. “I remember that room very well,” Alexis says. “It had a giant blue waterbed and a window overlooking the street.” There was also a hot tub. “It was big enough for a few people. But I never thought, oh, that’s gross. We didn’t have a swimming pool, so we’d go swimming in there.”

Every evening, the women gathered on the blind side of the lobby’s two-way mirror to await their customers. A list of prices hung on the wall. Once the doors opened for business, Alexis and her sister were confined to the back of the building. Off-limits to everyone but family, this area belonged to their paternal grandmother — the Madame. Grandma never talked about what was happening on the other side of the hotel. “She just pretended it was normal” — even through pregnancies, police raids and extra-marital affairs.

Alexis’ mother had entered the brothel-owning family through an arranged marriage and likely knew about their business from the beginning. “But when you’re a Filipino woman, you can’t say no,” Alexis says. Her mom wound up working as the brothel’s receptionist and witnessing her husband’s affairs, which were conducted freely in the open.

“In [the] Philippines, it’s very acceptable to have mistresses,” she says. “It’s a patriarchal country, and it’s one of the poorest.” Prostitution is also widespread in the island nation, but the concept of paying for sex was virtually nonexistent before the Spanish appeared in 1565. They stayed for the next three centuries, leaving only after the Spanish-American War turned the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico into U.S. territories. The Philippines would later achieve independence, which arrived in 1946 after 50 years of U.S. rule, including the bloody PhilippineAmerican War and a brutal Japanese occupation during the Second World War.

Few Americans today realize that the tropical archipelago was once U.S. property. But there’s nary a soul in the Philippines that hasn’t felt the effects of the U.S. military presence, a steady influence for more than a century. Over 125,000 American troops fought there in World War II to help oust the Japanese, and plenty more stuck around for decades at military bases. All these soldiers (combined with rapid modernization) fueled the Philippines’ thriving sex trade and global reputation for prostitution. Sex tourism is the third-highest contributor to the nation’s economy today, with most women (and children) pressured into the business by their families and financial desperation.

Such was no doubt the case for many of the girls Alexis saw at the brothel, but she never viewed the situation as anything out of the ordinary. “It was like nothing,” she recalls. “I didn’t think about it until later.” But her mother certainly did. After a few years there, she was done. Alexis’ dad arranged for the family to move to a far-away city — without him. “He would never come and visit. We had no food; we had nothing. No milk for my sister, she was a toddler. We had a rich father, but we were living really poor.” Divorce was literally not an option; it has been outlawed in the Philippines since 1954.

To provide for her daughters, Alexis’ mom moved away to work as a housemaid in Hong Kong, where wages were much higher. Young Alexis didn’t understand the economic distress they were facing. All she knew was that she felt abandoned by her mother. The children moved in with their aunt, who lived deep in the countryside with three teenage sons. “I was like their Cinderella,” she says, “I had to clean, I had to cook, I had to wax the wooden floors on my hands and knees.” She fetched food for the brothers late at night by herself and hauled tall buckets of water for their showers. “That is when I started to get physically abused, beat up by my mom’s sister’s kids.” On one of her mother’s rare visits, Alexis told her about the abuse. “I just saw her cry. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t have anyone else to watch us.”

By the time Alexis entered high school, she was living with a different aunt. But her reality was about to change even more. Her mother had been dating an American named Willard and was finally able to procure a divorce in Hong Kong. They married, and the new family moved to Las Vegas.

“We were so, so happy. We went to the United States thinking that life would be better. And in the beginning, it was very nice. I had my own room and my own bed. But then it wasn’t as good as we thought it would be. [Willard] and my mom had issues. They would fight and they would fight and they would fight. It was just chaotic. He was not nice to her … then she stopped coming home.”

So, Alexis left to forge her own way, obtaining her GED and enrolling in community college to study business. “I had to support myself … I was always working a few jobs.” A secretary by day and cocktail waitress by night, she met her first husband at a pool hall where she worked. Their relationship progressed quickly. “We started dating, we got married, we moved to Oregon — bam-bambam.” A baby boy named Parker came next. But just three months later, her husband announced that he was leaving. He’d found someone else. “I called my mom,” she says. “I didn’t know what else to do.” Blindsided, Alexis returned to Las Vegas with Parker and one suitcase, leaving everything else behind.

“I started working three jobs. I was working at a bank, cocktailing at a rinkydink Filipino cocktail bar, and working for my aunt on weekends. I was getting really depressed … I was 24 with nothing.” But she did have a dream: to be a real estate agent. She wrote it down — I want to be a Realtor — along with a plan to get out of her current situation. A few years later, she achieved that goal and became a licensed real estate agent and loan officer.

“I was making really good money,” she remembers. “From driving a Yugo, now I had a Porsche. I had five houses and was renting them.” It was 2007 and life was good — then the mortgage crisis hit. “I lost everything. No one was buying houses; no one was doing loans. I didn’t know what to do or how to financially support my son.” With nowhere to live except her car, Alexis made the excruciating decision to send Parker to stay with her sister in Arizona.

Once again, she had to create a different path forward. She heard about the government’s new mortgage modification program and threw herself into learning how it worked. “I was like, I can do that. I know real estate, I know loans. I can do modifications. How hard can it be?” She made Starbucks her office and began calling her old clients, many of whom were now losing their homes. “I start saving houses and start to get my life together. I get Parker back.”

Alexis hadn’t just found a new livelihood, she’d also found Dan, whom she would later marry. But first — her future as a baker was about to begin. Parker was turning 13, and she wanted to make him a birthday cake, so she bought a chocolate mix and a plastic tub of icing. “I made a flat sheet cake, then I took a spoon and scooped all the frosting out of the container and slapped it on there.” She wrote “Happy Birthday, Parker” in blue lettering and then stepped back to admire her handiwork. “It was the ugliest cake I had ever seen,” she says. “It was like a 5-year-old made it. It made me cry.” Parker saw no problem with the cake and devoured it. “But I’m the kind of person that I know I can always do better with anything I do, and I told Parker, ‘Next year I will make you the best, most beautiful cake you’ve ever had.’”

Dan bought her a thick pastry cookbook from Sur La Table and Alexis dove in. “From beginning to end, I baked everything. It showed you how to make croissants, cakes — everything. After I did that, I called myself a pastry chef.”

14th birthday, she was opening a gourmet bakery in the family’s new home of Orange County, California. Business boomed; Alexis was baking 500 cupcakes a day, and soon she had another kind of bun in the oven. Then tragedy struck.

“Two weeks after we found out the baby was a girl, we lost her. I was five months pregnant,” she says, her voice trembling. “It was very hard.” The doctors called it “a fluke,” but Alexis couldn’t accept it. She and Dan were young and healthy. They didn’t smoke or drink. After stumbling on an article about toxins in our food, she started researching the benefits of an organic lifestyle and went all-in, from her cooking to her clothes. Her son Aiden arrived shortly after and so did her new bakery, Sweet Frosted Confections.

When the Food Network called in 2019 to ask Alexis to appear on “Christmas Cookie Challenge,” it had only been six months since she started decorating cookies. She accepted. “I don’t have formal pastry schooling. Some people say you can’t call yourself a pastry chef unless you went to pastry school. But for me, it’s what you think you can do. The way I saw it was: If she can do it, if he can do it — I can do it.”

Most recently appearing on Food Network’s “Gingerbread Championships” late last year, Alex bakes because it’s “beautiful” and it helps to calm her mind. “I’m always thinking. But when I’m baking, I’m focused on the buttercream,” she says. “And I love baking because it has a beginning, a middle and an end. I love to clean, too … I see something so messy and so dirty and then so clean right after. There’s an end to it.”

But there’s no end to Alexis’ aspirations. “Why? We’re in a country where anything is possible. I came from a third-world country where when you’re a certain age, by the time you’re 30 or 40 — you’re done. We’re in a country where you could be 80 or 90 years old and still learning. I’m 47 and I just started learning how to play the violin. You can be anything.” Perched beside her cookbooks, a bright pink violin stands ready for her next lesson, a testament to her willingness to face new challenges — and to conquer them through hard work, tenacity and the sheer strength of spirit gained from decades of ups and downs. From the brothel to the bakery, Alexis is more than a pastry chef; she is an inspiration to face life’s many obstacles with a can-do attitude — and a cupcake or two.