About This Blog

This blog was born out of my passion for baking, and my love for my Mom.

 Last year, while scrolling through Netflix looking for something new to binge-watch, I came across the icon for “The Great British Baking Show”, or as it is called in the proper Queen’s English “The Great British Bake Off.” I’m not usually one to watch reality shows, but the internet gods decided to take fate into their hands that day and nudged my finger for me to watch these amateur bakers on a quest to be named the U.K.'s best baker. Watching these contestants compete is like a master class in baking. I was mesmerized at learning how puff pastry is laminated, seeing meringue whipped into three different and distinct forms and discovering how to avoid a soggy bottom. It completely rekindled my love of baking.

Also last year, I lost my wonderful and amazing mother. After her memorial, I riffled through closets and boxes and drawers, as we all do, desperately hoping to find some journal or writing or something, something of her legacy, something to tell me it would all be okay, anything that gave me one last communication with her that I could hold on to. I didn’t find it. What I did find was a drawer stuffed full of recipes. Recipes she had collected over the years, recipes torn out of magazines, scribbled on the back of envelopes, and peeled off of backs of canned goods. I found pages of cookbooks with dog-eared corners, handwritten notes jotted down in the margins and cryptic transcriptions of recipes that I may never quite know what the outcome was meant to be. Many of the family favorites were also missing. I believe she was trying to collect and archive them all in her last months. My mother was a true believer in the magic of baking. No matter how bad things were, she knew something as simple as a homemade batch of brownies could bring just a little bit of happiness. In a way, this drawer full of recipes was more than just a collection of papers and instructions, it’s a drawer full of hope, happiness and love.

My mom Nina Lynn Tweel Callen and I doing a little wine tasting in SoCal.

This blog is a tribute to my mother, my love of baking, the original The Great British Bake Off, and to every amateur baker who ever spent over $3 on a cupcake and thought to themselves, “I can do better than that.” These are the recipes she loved, the ones she never got to try, and some that I think she would have loved to have baked for me and some I would have loved to bake for her. These are my memories of her, sprinkled with sugar, covered in chocolate, and baked with love.