Cakes and Bakes

For me, baking has been a treasured past time. My mother is an excellent cook and wonderful baker and where I learned quite a few of my cooking chops. Growing up and through the 4H program the only project I took every year for ten years was "foods". Cooking! Baking! Creating! All my favorite things. Sidebar: while I love being in the kitchen, I despise the clean up! My mom, my sister, my aunts, my mother-in-law... all excellent house keepers... me, not so much. We all have our skills and that just isn't my area. 

I digress.

My grandma bought me my first cookbook, as a child. What kid wants a cookbook for their birthday? I was pretty psyched about it. And honestly, this is still one of my favorite books for the amount of information in it. There are a couple recipes I still have flagged in there, but the tables and the conversions, I know exactly what page they're on, it's my favorite.

And a handwritten note on the first page of the book, well, I'll just never let this one go.

My little cubby is chocked full of books and loose leaf recipes shoved haphazardly inside. I have to admit that I don't consult my little library very often anymore with Pinterest right at my fingertips but... there's something special and nostalgic about my collection. 

My love for the kitchen planted dreams of culinary school which I quickly pushed to the side because as most anyone who knows me knows that I am a fairly picky eater! You can't go to culinary school if you don't eat the food you cook. That'd be ridiculous. Then I thought, well, there's always pastry school. Well, that never happened and I don't regret not having chose that path for my life. Instead, I get to bake when I want to and what I want to and try out new recipes. I get to express myself through my baking and most importantly, it makes my kids really happy!

Recently I've been getting more and more requests for some of my creations and I am happy to extend my bakes outside of just my kitchen. Being hired to bake is an entirely new concept to me but one that I'm excited about. Like any normal baker would do (ha!) I have many pictures of my most recent and important bakes that I plan on posting to give some reference of the kinds of things I like to do. Happy baking!