I think my love of baking started when I was a toddler. My Nana always had cake for dessert after dinner. So in the afternoons, she would bake a cake. I used to watch and when she was done pouring the batter into the baking pan, I would sit in the floor and lick the bowl. And share the batter with my best friend Nuisance. Nuisance was a black and red dachshund who wandered up to my Nana’s and Papa’s house on the day I was born. It was fate that she and I became best friends. ☺ That was the start of my great love of dogs and baking.
I skipped the easy bake oven stage and when right to the real oven. Around 9 or 10, I discovered chocolate chip cookie recipe on the back of the bag of Nestle Tollhouse semi-sweet chocolate chips. It wasn’t long until I had that recipe memorized. I worked my way through boxed mixes in the baking section of the grocery store aisle and I must have burnt out the motors on at least a dozen handheld electric mixers. To this day hand held mixers and I do not…well mix. By the time I was in my late teens, my mother invested in a Kitchen Aid stand mixer.
In my teens, I branched out to different recipes in various cookbooks including a German Chocolate Cake from scratch. Needless to say, it was a hit. I discovered I had a real knack for baking and knowing when baked goods (especially cookies) were done without being overdone. That is a real problem with cookies. 8-10 minutes does not mean literally 8-10 minutes. It means know your oven and know whatever it is you are baking. At this time I pretty much became the family baker and pretty much specialized in cookies though I can bake just about anything to perfection. When I married, my mom and dad bought me a Kitchen Aid stand mixer as a wedding gift.
It didn’t take long for my brothers-in-law and my husband’s friends to discover my cookies. I never bought ready-made cookies. It got to the point where as soon as they came in the door, they all went straight to the cookie jar. They still do. I even started getting requests for cookies from my husband’s side of the family for family gatherings though I wasn’t the “official” family baker. That honor went to my husband’s Aunt Linda and rightfully so; my cookies were good, Linda’s were divine! I was a young babe in the baking world, but Linda was a seasoned pro and had already begun making her own recipes. Linda was generous though and shared some of her recipes with me which encouraged me to start tinkering with recipes and adding and subtracting from them.
Skip ahead several years. I have created several recipes of my own and am now the “official” baker of both my birth family and my married family. According to my husband, I have finally surpassed the master and my cookies are now beyond divine. I don’t know about that, but I still love to bake. And I love to share the bit of happiness that cookies bring to people’s lives, so you will see a lot of dessert recipes on my blog.