Cherry Pie for a summer market
Sometimes I sit and think about how far this business has come and how many times I’ve had to change it to meet my needs.
I used to sit in my classes at the University of Kentucky, when I was an undergrad, and draw pictures of these elaborate cakes I would try to make. Things like a five-tiered snow covered mountain with a Christmas village and a train that ran through each tier up and down the cake. This was my doodling, my hobby, just drawing out the cake but not actually creating them. And it all came about before tv shows like Ace of Cakes or all of those crazy cake challenges. I mean, it was 1996-97, so the Food Network was still in all its glory with actual cooking shows.
Years later, when I started bringing some of those creations to life (by this time I was in grad school), it was literally for the challenge. I made a 3D rubber duck cake for a friend’s baby shower. I made my nephew Oscar, a 3D Oscar the Grouch cake in a trash can (my first fully allergen free cake, actually). I did a Sponge Bob cake, and a lady bug cake, and multiple other ones before I ultimately decided, “Wow, I hate this.” I didn’t like the decorating part at all, I actually only liked the “cake architecture” part where you make everything stand up correctly and it’s all supported. I realized that all of my drawings back in college had really been about structure and not art. A train running through a five tiered cake was more about “How will I pull this off?” versus “Let me make a cute snowy village cake.” Can you tell I’m the daughter of an engineer with engineering brothers? Ha.
These days, my cakes are much more basic.
Basically, I need the challenge. When I beat the challenge, I just create a new challenge for myself. And the next new challenge was making all of my old recipes gluten free, then egg free, then dairy free, and so on. So I dropped the decorating (phew).
Then I challenged myself to open and run a bakery. Did I love it?
I think I loved the idea of it, the stress of it, the excitement of making every person work in harmony to create an end result.
And then I didn’t love it. Maybe I was too old to deal with the stress. Maybe the pandemic, that took my business from a 30-40K a month bakery to a 7K a month bakery, made me hate it. Maybe I couldn’t tell another employee what to do anymore. Maybe I couldn’t order supplies, and wait for something crucial, and then change a recipe because it just never arrived. Maybe I was going through early menopause and had hot flashes every day. Maybe I couldn’t take one more employee calling off work, so I had to cover my shift and their shift and work open to close. Maybe I couldn’t handle one more roof leak in that building every time it rained.
This home bakery has been a much happier place. I’m working next to WINDOWS!
Whatever it was (um, all of the above), I pivoted again. Home bakery and farmer’s markets? Sure, that sounds restful. It’s not. When you’re baking at a high volume, it’s still labor intensive 12-16 hour days, every day. But it gave me just enough insight into my whole bakery life, to reclaim my passion and need for a challenge that I used to have. It started the fire again and now I’m excited about my business all over, as if it were new.
At any point along the way, I could have given up completely. I could “get a real job” as some people tell me. I could go back to teaching and have actual health insurance and a retirement plan. I could have more money in the bank and not be paying on a 30-year covid EIDL loan that I took out to cover employees and business costs during a pandemic. But giving up isn’t really my style. Pivoting, changing, solving problems, that’s my style.
And here I am, pivoting again. I've moved indoors, expanded wholesale, and started building a business that looks nothing like the one I doodled in my college notebooks. I'm not making elaborate cakes anymore, and I'm certainly not running a retail shop with a dozen employees. But I'm still doing what I've always done: figuring out how to make something work, how to make it better, and how to challenge myself along the way.
And you know what? Good for me. It feels nice to (sort of) support yourself from something you created out of nothing.
As I think about the new changes that I’m implementing in January 2027, I know it’s mostly about challenging myself to do things slightly out of my comfort zone. But I can’t walk away from baking, my first and only love. And I hope you’ll come along with me and we can see where this goes. I’m going to ride this train all the way to the end.
I have a vague, hopeful idea where this next pivot will take me, but no one really knows how it will all work out (which is what makes life so exciting).
Challenge accepted, though, because apparently, I can't help myself.
