Meet Charlotte’s ‘Concha Lady’

Norma Zuniga has a sweet tooth, so she’s always kept up with new bakeries in Charlotte. In 2019, she learned that Cris Rojas, aka The Batchmaker, was opening The Batch House in Wesley Heights. “I’d never seen another Latina in the Charlotte food scene who has her own bakery,” Zuniga, 30, tells me in May. “I was such a fangirl. I went the first day she opened, and I remember that I got her last chocolate chip cookie before she sold out.”

Zuniga began to allow herself to dream of owning a bakery, too. “I was like, ‘If The Batchmaker can do it, that means I can also open my own bakery,’” she says. “Mexico has so much more to offer than tres leches and churros.”

But Zuniga hadn’t spent much time in the kitchen before. She turned to YouTube to learn how to make a popular Mexican treat: conchas, lightly sweet rolls topped with crunchy, sugary shells. She didn’t want to make just the traditional chocolate and vanilla conchas she’d grown up eating. She wanted to join a select group of bakers in other cities who make them bigger and sweeter with flashy flavors and designs—the Crumbl Cookies of conchas. 

Above: A Concha Cinnamon Roll with dulce de leche. Below: A Guava Stuffed Concha.

  

She launched Dulce Dreams Café from City Kitch in December 2021. “I wanted to get everyone in Charlotte to know what a concha is like they know what a chocolate chip cookie or a doughnut is,” she says. The following month, she began hosting pop-ups. She also attended business workshops and classes. “In one of them, someone said, ‘If you don’t focus on your business 100%, you’re never going to be able to do it.’ And that really stuck with me.” 

In October 2022, Zuniga quit her job as a plasma center lab technician. She had wanted to attend nursing school after she graduated from West Charlotte High School 12 years ago. But as an undocumented student with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, immigration status—her family came to Charlotte from San Luis Potosi, Mexico, when she was 5—she would’ve had to pay out-of-state tuition, which she says she couldn’t afford. So she attended Johnson C. Smith University, which recruits and grants financial aid to undocumented students. She majored in the closest thing to nursing the school offers—biology. But she’d found her work in labs monotonous. Conchas offered her an alternative.

Today, Zuniga runs Dulce Dreams from a kitchen in Myers Park Baptist Church. She does about three pop-ups per week, takes special orders, and sells her pastries every Saturday at the Uptown Farmers Market. Her conchas come in more than 50 flavors, like cookies and cream, flan, guava, Biscoff cookie, strawberry cheesecake, key lime pie, bacon, and matcha. She can make almost any shape or design: Barbie, Pokémon, Hello Kitty, dinosaurs, ’70s-style flowers.

 “Before I started this, since I already had my biology degree, I felt like I had to stick with it, but I slowly have realized that it’s OK to change your plans, no matter how old you are.”

  

Some get fillings, like cookie dough, compotes, or pastry creams, and elaborate toppings, like glazes, crumbles, fruit slices, cookies, and toasted marshmallows. 

While conchas remain her primary product—some customers, she says, call her their “Concha Lady”—she also offers an assortment of other desserts and Mexican pastries, like cinnamon rolls, corn-flour cookies, cheesecakes, and jalapeño-Oaxaca cheese rolls. 

Her next goal is to turn Dulce Dreams Café into a brick-and-mortar bakery—“like a panaderia but more modern. Like a Mexican bakery-slash-coffee shop, where people can feel at home, work or do homework, or just hang around.” In May, she launched a crowdfunding campaign on the platform Spotfund with a $100,000 goal to cover startup costs.

She also hopes to inspire other Latinas and women the way The Batchmaker inspired her, and she takes every opportunity to champion those she knows. “One more thing,” Zuniga tells me as we wrap up our Zoom call. “I want to tell you about another Latina business owner in Charlotte …”

Tess Allen is the associate editor.