Why Cake

I've had a love for baking for as long as I can remember. When I was a little
girl I would help my mother bake cookies around Christmas time each year.
We would make many different kinds of cookies and then wrap them up and
give them to our friends and family as gifts. To me Christmas wouldn't be
Christmas without baking lots of cookies and giving them out to my loved
ones. It was a tradition my mother had learned from her mother, and she
passed it down to me.

When I was in High School my love for baking drew me towards a part-time
job at a Dunkin Donuts/Baskin Robbins. I soon worked my way up from
cashier to a position finishing the donuts and making the custom ice cream
cake orders. For about 1 and a half years I frosted and filled donuts and
created hand-made ice cream cakes…and I absolutely loved it.

My time at Dunkin Donuts came to an end in 1999 when I went away to college. I got a Bachelors degree in Chemical
Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. Needless to say I did little, if any, baking while in college due to
the heavy work load. When I graduated in 2003 I got a job with a big chemical company, and moved to Virginia near Washington,
DC. I finally picked up baking again since I had a lot more free time being on my own. Soon I was making cakes for friends' parties
and birthdays. On a whim I signed up for a Cake Decorating class at the local High School in order to expand what little
knowledge I had. I soon discovered that I not only loved cake decorating, but I was pretty good at it too. I signed up for many
more classes and eventually got a Cake Decorating Certification.

I've been officially cake decorating since 2004. I try to compete in the Great American Cake show and National Capitcal Area
cake show every year (I placed second in the Intermediate category in 2006). I have also competed in the Nordic Ware "Bundts
Across America" recipe contest two years in a row and I even placed top ten in the country in 2006 (click here to see results). I've
made many birthday cakes for my friends and family and I've been asked to make many of my friends' wedding cakes. I am continually
trying to improve my skills through books and classes and I've created this web-site in order to share all that I have learned with you.