The Beginning of Something Delicious

I've been wanting to start a baking blog of some sort for a while, but I didn't know what I wanted it to look like, where to start, and my favorite excuse, just didn't "Have the time." Now, thanks to COVID-19, I am found in the same place as a lot of other baking friends have found themselves this week--at home, with no shifts in sight, trying to stay sane!

So, here I am, no more excuses, just me and a blank page that hopefully leads to somewhere delicious!

I began baking the same way as many people did, sitting on my Grandma's kitchen counter licking the bowl, beaters, spatula, and whatever else may have some yummy, sweet batter on it. My Mom (who I now call "Ma," just like she calls my Grandma, because we all turn in to our mothers eventually!) would stay up late during the Christmas season to make sugar cookie dough in order for it to be chilled by the time we woke up the next day. We would spend all day cutting out and decorating those sugar cookies and then finish our marathon cookie day off by making the Tollhouse recipe chocolate chip cookies, always two batches-one with pecans and one without.

Other than those Christmas cookie days, mostly everything else we made came from a box, and that was great! My Grandma gave me a Cake Mix Doctor cook book on how to fancy up cake mixes and that was better! Then, when I was sixteen I discovered my Mom's The Harmony Grove cookbook. It was a cookbook that the Peebles department stores put out in order to sell their little ceramic village, each house corresponded to an old house in the cookbook. My Mom collected those too for a while, but I digress.

This cookbook opened new doors for me. If you open it, there are two very well used recipes in it, the one my Mom uses for her cheese danish bread every Christmas and the one that awakened my love for cakes. My Mom loves carrot cake and I decided to make her one, this one, from the cookbook. I was so excited, I grated THREE CUPS of carrots BY HAND. It took me F..O..R..E..V..E..R the first time, but I eventually perfected it and can do it in no time flat now. The problem was when it came out of the oven, cooled off, and was iced it was missing something. So, I played around with the recipe adding things until it became the carrot cake I make today.

I went to college, got married, started a career at Barnes and Noble College, and then my husband went on deployment two. He was gone for almost a year and I decided to send all our friends deployed with him fun carepackages to pass the time. Jar cakes became a thing. I baked cake (recipes from the cake mix doctor!) in mason jars and when it came out of the oven I put the lids on and let the heat seal them so when they received them overseas two weeks later they were still fresh! Downside-no icing, but they still loved them!

My husband came home, and the baby boom was real, ya'll! We got pregnant and had a miscarriage around 8 weeks. A month later we were expecting baby #2. The pregnancy was picture perfect- no morning sickness, I was craving all the healthy foods, and he was growing and progressing right no track. On December 4, 2014, Jack Reagan was born, and then quietly passed away. Being born at 23 weeks, he was just too early. Being on maternity leave with no baby to take care of is basically hell, but we made it through with lots of love and help from friends and family.

Returning to work after maternity leave, I found out that I was going to be passed up for a promotion by someone who definitely deserved it and had more experience, but it still hurt

and wasn't my plan so I decided to go back to school rather than wait around for that position to open up again. Due to a lot of convincing by my husband and my Mom I decided to go to pastry school, which led me to a little place in Gaithersburg, Maryland named L'Academie de Cuisine. It had a French Pastry school started by former White House Pastry Chef Roland Mesnier, and it opened me up to a whole new world!

My love for cake making was solidified there, but I was also so thankful to learn so many other yummy things, some of which I had never heard of, tried, or much less attempted to make myself. I was in a class with only a handful of other people who encouraged each other to succeed (a common trait in the restaurant industry), and I was an honor roll student for the first time in my life. I went on to an internship at a little seafood restaurant with a big heart where I later became the Executive pastry chef, before moving on to a luxury hotel chain to learn new pastry skills I hadn't learned yet. All that has led me here, to being cooped up in my house, with no work temporarily, and needing something to do. Hopefully I have found you ready to try new things and on our journey to finding something delicious!