About Us

👋 Hi, I’m Emily.

I live in Denver with my husband Mark, our three-year-old daughter Lily, and a sourdough starter named Gus who just turned five.

Gus has been with me longer than the kid. Mark says I should bake him a birthday loaf. I told him Gus is the birthday loaf.

I’m the person who wakes up at 4 a.m. to shape dough. I’m also the person who’s burned a loaf this year, over-proofed another into the compost bin, and once produced a chocolate cake that looked like a mudslide and tasted like redemption.

Delicious beats beautiful. Every single time.

📊 Before the Apron: The Data Years

I spent four years as a digital marketing analyst at an ad agency in Chicago.

• Built pivot tables for a living

• Stared at spreadsheets until my eyes blurred

• Wrote client decks and quarterly forecasts

• Was good at it, but wasn't in it

The stress showed up in predictable ways: bad sleep, short patience, a nagging sense that I was solving problems that didn't actually matter.

Then one night, at 11 p.m., during a particularly bad week, I found myself aggressively kneading dough in my tiny apartment kitchen. I'd never baked bread before. I didn't own a scale. I used all-purpose flour and active dry yeast from the back of the pantry.

The loaf came out dense, pale, and ugly.

I ate the whole thing in one sitting.

Not because it was good — it wasn't, really — but because for two hours, my brain went quiet. Just flour, water, salt. The rhythm of it. The physics of it. My mind, which normally ran three tabs at once, finally shut up.

Something clicked. I fell in deep, the way people do when they find the thing they didn't know they were looking for.

📚 The Education (No Certificate, No Debt)

B.S. in Statistics — University of Illinois, 2015
(Yes, I can calculate standard deviation in my sleep. Yes, I use it on bread.)

Self-Study (The Real Curriculum)

Key texts that broke my brain (in a good way):

• Tartine Bread — read until the spine cracked

• The Bread Baker's Apprentice — annotated like a textbook

• Bouchon Bakery — for when I wanted to cry over macarons

The Apprenticeship (Where the Real Learning Happened)

Walked into a neighborhood sourdough bakery in Chicago, asked the owner — a grumpy Frenchman named Gérard — if I could wash dishes in exchange for watching. He looked at me like I'd asked to borrow his grandmother's ring.

I showed up the next Saturday anyway.

I learned to handle dough that fought back. I learned that a good loaf and a great one are often separated by three minutes of patience. I learned that professionals fail all the time — they just know how to fix it faster.

And I learned that Gérard's yelling was actually affection. Just French affection.

🔄 The Pivot: From Analyst to Baker

2015 — Graduated, joined ad agency as data analyst
2017 — First loaf (dense, pale, life-changing)
2018–2020 — Two years of obsessive self-study
2020 — Walked into Gérard's bakery, started apprenticing
2021 — Moved to Denver with Mark
2022 — Became part-time partner at the same bakery (remote: social media + recipe standardization)
2023 — Lily arrived, flour intake temporarily decreased
2026 — Here we are

Current job title I give at parties:
Part-time partner, former data analyst, still the outsider with a key.

🏔️ Why Denver Matters

I live and bake at 5,280 feet above sea level.

If you've never baked at altitude: water boils at 202°F (not 212°F), bread proofs differently, cakes collapse faster, and every recipe from sea level needs adjustment.

I've had to relearn a lot of what I thought I knew. It's been humbling. It's also been the best thing for this blog — every recipe I share has been tested in a home oven, at high altitude, with ingredients from the local Whole Foods.

👨‍👧‍👦 The People Who Keep Me Sane (and Covered in Flour)

Mark — Husband, 32, Middle-School STEM Teacher

• The one who said: "You light up when you talk about fermentation. That's not normal. You should follow it."

• The one who told me, after I pulled a lopsided cake out of the oven and wanted to trash it: "It's not a mistake. It's a map."

• Pre-sets my scale and filters my water the night before a bake

• Official hand model for flour-dusting shots

• Chief taste-tester and brutally honest critic

• Once said a croissant tasted "like air" — I chased him with a rolling pin

Lily — Daughter, 3.5 Years Old

• Official taste-tester (palate: unpredictable)

• Resident flour-bandit

• Believes rolling pins are drumsticks

• Once shaped dough into an "alien croissant" — I baked it anyway

• Thinks every crack in a loaf looks like a map or a dinosaur

Gus — Sourdough Starter, 5 Years Old

• Born in my Chicago apartment, spring 2019

• Moved to Denver with us, survived the altitude adjustment

• Has been neglected, overfed, underfed, and revived more times than I'd like to admit

• Currently thriving

• He's a member of this family and I will not apologize for that

🌿 Outside the Kitchen (What I Do When I'm Not Baking)

Hiking the Front Range

I hike every week. Partly because I love the mountains. Partly because I need to burn off whatever just came out of the oven. I call it "thermal energy balance" — Mark calls it "eating a whole loaf and walking it off." Potato, potahto.

The Trail Snacks section on this blog exists because of this hobby. Portable, high-protein, non-crumbly things you can shove in a backpack.

Gardening (Badly, But Enthusiastically)

I grow rosemary and thyme on my kitchen windowsill. Snipping fresh herbs into focaccia is one of those small pleasures that never gets old. I also grow tomatoes in the backyard. They're a mess. I love them anyway.

Garage Sales and Thrift Stores

I hunt for vintage cast iron and ceramic baking dishes that cost eight dollars and have more character than anything I could buy new. My favorite find: a 1950s Pyrex pie plate with a chip on the rim. Perfectly imperfect.

True Crime Podcasts

I knead dough to murder mysteries. The narration cadence — calm, measured, slightly ominous — matches the rhythm of hand-kneading perfectly. I don't know why it works. It just does. Current recommendation: Criminal.

❌ What You Won't Find Here

Just to be clear about what this blog is not:

• ❌ Recipes that require $500 equipment

• ❌ "100% fail-proof" guarantees (I don't believe in them)

• ❌ Keto/zero-carb/celery-juice-level health preaching

• ❌ Professional-show-off desserts (mirror glaze? go to a pastry shop)

• ❌ Vague measurements like "适量" or "a splash"

• ❌ Photos of Lily's face (she's mine, not content)

And one more thing:

I don't write like I have all the answers. I write like someone who's failed enough times to know what actually works.

✋ A Few Things to Get Out of the Way

Do I have a culinary degree? No.
Do I have a certificate on my wall? No.
Do I know what I'm doing? Yes. Because I've done it. Ten thousand times.

So why should you trust me?

Not because I'm perfect. Because I've failed more times than most influencers have baked. I show you the failures. I show you the fixes. And when nothing works, I tell you to throw it in the trash and try again tomorrow.

That's the deal.

🥣 The Last Word

If your cake cracks, your bread is dense, your starter looks dead — you're in good company. I've been there more times than I can count.

Bake ugly. Bake delicious. Burn something once in a while.

The dough will forgive you. So will I.

— Emily
Denver, 2026