Baking is fun for me. As a senior in high school I pefected my apple pie, brownies, Toll House cookies and Jon Hagels (a Dutch shortbread cookie). Not a huge portfolio, I know. I got married, graduated college, started teaching, had three kids, and life was busy. Like most people, I have done stints in different hobbies. I’ve knitted, embroidered and quilted and I have kept baking, but not to the degree I would have liked. And people: the internet is amazing. I love learning about the science of baking and seeing what other people are baking. You can do that on the internet! And I am loving baking. Seriously. It keeps me up at night.
My husband, John, and I have a business, and when we first started 15 years ago, and Christmas rolled around and we needed to think about giving Christmas gifts to a few (5) of our clients. I decided it would be a good use of money to make a cake that I knew was good, rather than to buy something from a bakery or mail order type of place. So I made John’s mom’s recipe for Cocoa Apple Cake, and it got a huge reviews. The next year we doubled our client base so I made more cakes. Again, great reviews. Then our client base grew again and I decided that was too much baking for one person so we did something else entirely, and I heard about it from our clients. They missed the freshly baked home made cake.
Fast forward ten years and our daughter is getting married, and she asks for Cocoa Apple Cake at the reception. So, I baked Cocoa Apple Cake and also an Orange Spice Cake. And I liked doing it. It gave me joy. One night shortly after the wedding, I watched a documentary on PBS called A Few Good Pie Places and I immediately knew making pies and cakes for other people was something I wanted to do. So here I am, making pies and cakes. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoy making them.