Capital City Sweets’ new home adds homemade ice cream

On a trip to Manhattan during his senior year of high school, Patrick Kayser noticed a trend that had not yet made its way to Lansing: edible cookie dough shops.

“It was a new niche,” he said, “just selling cookie dough like you sell ice cream.”

The idea stuck with him, leading him to enter the first Lansing Built to Last pitch competition in 2021, in which Capital City Sweets became a finalist. Shortly after, the dual ice-cream-and-cookie-dough business began selling in Middle Village downtown.

Now, Kayser and co-owner Daniel Mooney are opening their first standalone storefront Thursday, May 22. The Michigan Avenue location will sell hand-dipped ice cream and edible cookie dough and feature new rotating specials.

The ice cream at the shop will be homemade, with new flavors to choose from. While the business has been making its edible cookie dough in the Allen Neighborhood Center’s incubator kitchen, the ice cream sold at the market and at events like Lansing Lugnuts games was purchased wholesale.

“Instead of buying from somewhere else, we can finally make it here,” Kayser said. “And we can make the really cool flavors people suggest to us, or that we have in the back of our heads.”

Capital City Sweets’ location on Michigan Avenue holds significance to Kayser. Besides being a prime spot in his eyes, it is in the same building where he met his fiancée, Andrea Rombach, who is heavily involved with the business. Kayser called her akin to a COO.

The building also contains Hooked, another 2021 Lansing Built to Last finalist.

“It’s really cool to see that Hooked is in the same building we are,” Kayser said. “It’s fun to see that pitch competition did lead to a lot of places for those businesses that were part of it.”

Kayser said Lansing is a great place to be a young entrepreneur. At only 26, he said he wouldn’t be where he is without community support. After studying urban planning and real estate at Michigan State University, he began working in real estate at MSU Federal Credit Union. The job has “really expanded the opportunities I have,” he said, “because I just talk to a bunch of people.”

“The Lansing community is almost secretively a very awesome community in terms of connections,” he said. “You can ask people for help, and they’ll just help. That’s really helped get us to where we’re at.”

But it’s not all business to Kayser. He said his attachment to ice cream comes from his childhood, when his family would go out for ice cream on a weekly basis. When they went on vacation or visited relatives, they would always pop into a local ice cream shop. Kayser hopes he can provide that experience for visitors to Lansing.

“The biggest thing I wanted to bring to Lansing is that, for anybody who is a tourist, here for a conference or visiting their kids at Michigan State, I want to be that spot,” he said. “I want to be a community-centric place where people can just hang out and get awesome desserts.”