Welcome to Bake Life Sweet!

Hello and welcome to Bake Life Sweet! I'm Tara, a professional pastry chef living out my dream of baking delicious things and getting paid to do it. So, how did I end up here? I've always had a passion for baking and was one of the very few teenagers I knew with my own KitchenAid mixer, preferring to bring the baked goods to the team sports events than participating in the sports themselves. When it came time to pick a career at age 18 (why we encourage teenagers to make major life decisions is a mystery to me, but that's a whole other topic of conversation), becoming a chef wasn't in my realm of possibilities, and I decided I was going to become an International Businesswoman. Whatever that was, I would figure out, but it sounded pretty good as I filled out my college applications. I set off to school at Boston University, graduated with a degree in Business Administration and all the while continued baking. At BU, I was known for hosting a weekly dinner party where I'd gather all my friends, cook all day (usually extremely hungover from the weekend), and made sure to always include a dessert. 

In the kitchen

After graduation, I still wasn't sure what I wanted to do as a career, but knew I had to just do something, and followed my friends into the world of New York City advertising. It was a good job, but I didn't feel any real satisfaction from it, and I found myself baking with increasing frequency, devouring cookbooks and reading every related blog I came across. I even started my own blog, Cupcake Obsessed, as an outlet for my two interests - baking and writing. Eventually it became glaringly obvious that I wanted out of advertising, and I knew that I had to try my hand at a baking career. I enrolled at the French Culinary Institute, pushing myself to work full time, attend classes, and intern at Locanda Verde, a NYC restaurant with the phenomenally talented pastry chef, Karen DeMasco. A rough nine months for sure, but an incredibly worthwhile experience. After graduating from FCI, I worked in NYC restaurants for two years before a job opportunity brought me down to where I currently am, in Atlantic City, NJ, working as pastry sous chef in a really exciting and dynamic restaurant kitchen.

Whew, so hopefully you got through all that and now we can get to the fun part - the baking! My vision for this blog is for it to be a place for me to share some favorite recipes and provide an inside peek at the world of a professional chef. Not long after culinary school graduation, I had the words "Make Life Sweet" tattooed on my wrist, a constant reminder for me it's a privilege to be able to do what I do and to savor every minute of it. So this is Bake Life Sweet, a place where I get to share that with everyone else. Enjoy!