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Hannah Kahl Professor Presnell English 1103 23 September 2013 Bakers Lady Flour and eggs were always a prominent part of growing up for me. My mom cooked dinner every night with her reddish brown chin length hair was always pulled back into a half up half down style. I remember how pieces of it fell out and framed of her small structured face. My favorite memories, however, were those of my mom and me baking on the counter. Her hazel eyes were always filled with love and laughter which always made me smile. And her short hobbit like build made it difficult to reach things, so most of the time she was on her tip toes. Sometimes she even had me spring up on the counter to get things she couldnt reach even on her toes. I look just like her and take after her too. I am the youngest, and always have been the mess maker. My mom would always say Hannah, youre making a mess! and I would look at her with a batter covered face and smile like she just told the funniest joke in the world. Easy bake ovens were cool and all, but making big sugar cookies decorated with pink and red icing for Valentines Day, or decorating two dozen cupcakes in vibrant spring colors, and making pumpkin pies for thanksgiving has been and always will be the best. Ive always loved the smell of diabetes and heaven as our creations turned golden and we started to ice them. Every year I would beg my mom to make sugar cookies with me for Valentines Day to give to my friends. She hated it. She always said in a flippant tone They take too long and theyre never worth it, and I would respond candidly But mommy its a tradition!!! which was my answer for everything, but I always had so much fun! One year, however, we tried to mix it up a little bit and made a glaze icing. It was a mess; there were red, pink, and white icing covered toothpicks everywhere and clumps of icing in our hair, our hands were crusted with the colors of love and we were ooing and ahhing over how beautiful they were turning out to be. Some were swirled, some were splatter painted, and others had the appearance of stained glass. Every year since we have made these; it is now an official tradition.

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These were our Valentines Day cookies.

These were our springtime cupcakes.

Baking has always been me and my moms thing. We had dreams of opening a bakery and I was going to work for her. It was going to be called Kims Konfections or Sugar Shack. We have always been very skilled in baking, but we wanted to be able to decorate like Carlos from Cake Boss (but he takes decorating to a whole new level). So we decided to take cake decorating classes together. We took three classes, Decorating Basics, Flowers and Cake Designs, and Gum paste and Fondant. My personal favorite was the gum paste and fondant course. Fondant and gum paste are both sugar and glucose pastes that are used to mold and create life like shapes. One time I made a beautiful basket cake filled with bright orange tiger lilies with shimmering dew drenched stamens which I hand crafted. They all were molded as white flowers and then I got to paint them with different varieties and pigments of orange. I stroked black lines from the middle to the tips of the petals and added black dots in the middle to give the flower life. Then I dusted them lightly with shimmer to give a morning dew covered appearance. These flowers looked alive and were all placed on top of the woven cake to seem like a basket of flowers. Making gumpaste flowers is a very delicate process and it taught me an abundance of patients. Because gumpaste hardens like glass or pottery, it is very easily to break your molds which happened quite frequently when I was adding my flowers to the actual cake. By creating this cake I realized that I was passionate for this. I learned a lot and consumed every ounce of information that I could. My mom is an amazing baker and I aspire to be as great as her one day. Everything that she makes is always moist and fluffy and the icing is always creamy and full of rich flavor. You

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just wanted to inhale it, but you wanted to taste every bite. My mom has been cooking and baking on her own since she was nine years old; since my grandpa was a salesman and always on the road and my grandma was working long shifts at the bank, my mom learned how to make her own meals. Then following so, I learned how to bake and cook too. One of the best teaching experiences as far as cake decorating goes was when she made my sweet 16 birthday cake. This was just a little after we started to take cake decorating classes together. For my birthday I really wanted a Jessie Toy Story cake, because she was my favorite Disney character of all time. She was funny and sweet and I always related to her, because I always loved my toys and never wanted to hurt their feelings. My mom knew how much I wanted this cake, so I talked to her about how I wanted it to taste and gave some decorating ideas. But she did more than what I expected. With her hands she created leather boots and textured cow skin. She made the different patterns of Jessies cowgirl outfit and placed it from top to bottom as if it was her pants to her hat. She even wrote my name in black gel on the bottom of the boots (which is a classic trademark from the movie and I always mimicked with my Jessie doll). One thing that many people dont know are how many different colors you can dye fondant or buttercream icing (a classic). And not many people realize how messy it is either or how long it takes. When my mom made my cake I realized how articulate the process of baking and cake decorating really was, and I definitely learned about patients. It took a lot of time and precision and she had to start over a few times on the figures.

This is my sweet 16th cake my mom made for me

A majority of where our decorating techniques came from was from my instructor for my cake decorating classes. She was a bombastic African American woman named Kia Peoples. She is one of the most clever and witty people I know. She is the sweetest women I have ever met,

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and she had the brightest most sincere eyes Ive ever seen. She was very patient with my mom and me while teaching us the techniques of beautifying a cake. There were always many steps I had to take to create one single flower; the rose is the most complex out of all the flowers. Her personality made learning easy, interesting, and fluent. Her personality literally lite up the room from using words like Shenanigans and Fiddlesticks. She would mess up and start over and she showed us that with art, any kind of art, there is never a mistake made and nothing is permanent. She would get excited and bounce in her chair and was always involved in what was going on in our lives. I was the youngest in my class and had to work really hard to manage my time in order to even go, so she would always tease me and say Oh Hannah understands shes just like us...crazy. She had a positive attitude to the class and life and I learned so much from her. I actually become rather close to her and she became my mentor for my graduation project. My senior year was the first time that I took on my own cake project. Last fall I took wood shop, this was completely different than any other class that I have ever participated in, and my teacher became one of my favorite teacher I have ever had. Mr. Booze. He is one of those people that doesnt give two pints about what people think of him. Hes knowledgeable and intentionally went against the schools status quo and guidelines in order to make the class purposeful and useful like it was supposed to be. I was his Angel, partly because I was the only one who was a girl and mainly because he liked me and respected me and who I was. He always would joke with me about how I must be crazy to put up with everyone in this class and always took my side, on many occasions if I didnt like something someone was doing or saying it stopped because he stopped it. He always let me use his white board to study the processes of Meiosis and Mitosis and cellular respiration and the process of Cellular Respiration on days we had nothing to do or we couldnt be in the shop. We had a lot of free time and he would say Well you can always teach some of these lug heads something useful, hey they might actually learn something important. I hate to say it, but he was kind of right; one of my classmates looked at my Mitosis diagram and said Isn't that photosynthesis?...he was being dead serious. Life was never a bore in his class. Mr. Booze was my favorite because he took interest in me and made a difference in my senior year. It really changed my life. Senior year for most is the best time of their life, for me it was the worst experience ever. I hated it; I was always stressed and I didnt know how to handle it. I had the senior project, three of my four classes were AP classes, I was involved with marching band, I had work, college and scholarship applications, and it was

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too much. Mr. Booze helped me along the way and always showed me a different way to look at life and a new love for making things with my hands. He soon became my favorite teacher. At the beginning of the year he became sick from smoking and chewing Tabaco for too many years. He was out of class the first week of school and for a majority of the semester due to surgery then blood clots because of the surgery. During the summer he had a surgery that gave him a synthetic vein and artery and his body didnt adjust. It later caused several blood clots and eventually a heart attack. The doctors were struck into a panic and decided before he lost his life they would amputate it. That year was hard for him and he hated being away; he was very passionate about what he did and hated people having to help him, he felt so helpless. He was out of school for months and the next semester already started. I was waiting so long for him to return to school and I talked to a plethora of teachers about when he was returning. When I found out when he was returning I wanted to do something for him to make him smile and to comfort him as he adjusted to a new way of life. So I decided to do what I was best at and baked him cupcakes as a welcome back gesture. Everyone loves chocolate and I know that he would be tired for a while because of medicine and getting around, so I made mocha coffee cupcakes. They were devils food cake with a ganache filling. I made a mocha buttercream icing which because of the coffee, turned out metallic which was a really awesome bonus! I decided to be creative and sprinkled coffee grinds on top as decoration, and added a chocolate covered coffee bean on top of each one. This was the most enjoyable thing that I did my entire senior year and it was a turning point in my baking and cake decorating skill. It was the first time that I made a bake good from scratch by myself and decorated it with style. I had to go and buy everything I needed and I got the chocolate covered coffee bean from a local coffee shop from a candy dispenser. I put in a lot of quarters. Before I played a big part in making it, but I had a lot of help. This was completely mine and I fully put myself and my love into them. It relaxed me and I could unwind. While making these and gave me an outlet. It was something that I could pour myself into that was beautiful and elegant. Something that would take my mind to a different place, a world where it was peaceful and serene. I really enjoyed making them for him, and he loved them and I could tell that they cheered them up. That was one of my biggest accomplishments I have had.

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These are the cupcakes I made for Mr. Booze.

Baking became a huge part of my life. It connected me to my mom in more ways than one and was always a great source of wonderfully vivid memories. It also was an extraordinary outlet that helped me relieve myself from the world and turn my frustration, stress, anger, and remorse into something spectacular, beautiful, and radiant. And on the plus side it tasted amazing. It is always was a good way for me to comfort others or show my appreciation for them. Baking makes me happy and helps me make other people happy too. I yearn to bake and I have done it for so long it comes second nature to me. Im glad that I found this in my life; I stress so much and this is a way to relax myself and unwind. Ive always been a Jackie of all trades, never great at anything, just mediocre at everything. Now I finally have a talent that is all my own. It is my passion and it defines me.