About Me

MY CUPCAKE LOVE STORY:

I am often asked how my love story started with cupcakes.  

I am a Weight Watchers member who has lost 110 pounds and honestly, I love baking and eating food.

When my kids were growing up, I would bake wedding cakes and celebration cakes for friends and family. I am a self taught cake baker and decorator. I enjoyed baking and frosting wedding cakes with my signature buttercream and creating a masterpiece when decorating them. It was a fun hobby and I got request all the time from people I knew and their friends. 

However, when faced with the choice to keep baking or lose the weight I had gained from the bad habits I had created in the kitchen, I left the cake decorating behind me. 

During my weight loss journey I started eating sensibly and gave up baking in an effort to stop the eating the sweets I loved so much. I loved baking all kinds of treats not just cake, so giving it up was a new way of life. 

After 10 years of staying out of the kitchen (at one point my youngest son thought I did not know how to cook), I lost 110 pounds.  About 3 year ago someone asked me to decorate a cake for their child’s birthday and I realized how out of practice I was, with all the secret tips I had learned over the years. I knew what I had to do… I needed to start baking regularly to get my baking Mojo back that I had left behind when I hung up my apron. I had created some good cooking habits while in the kitchen and was ready to put my apron on and my “will power” to the test. I knew that I had to bake at least once a week to practice and whatever I baked had to leave my house the same day I made them. I may have will power, but having cupcakes on my counter for more than an hour would be dangerous! 

Cupcakes became my passion because I could pass them around to my neighbors and I could not do that with a full size cake. I knew if the cupcakes set in my kitchen I would be take nibbles until I had tasted or eaten several cupcakes. Therefore, I started baking every Sunday and delivering them around the neighborhood and taking them to friends at work. There should be a place in our lives for cupcakes goodness but it had no place in my kitchen once they were decorated! Cupcakes allow me to play an important part of other people’s celebrations; they are joyous little cakes that can be at the center of an event when creatively decorated! So my solution was simple get them out of sight- which is hard when I am testing recipes. During times like these I just rely on my son George to sample during the baking process and when I taste a little more than usual, I just made sure I would get more exercise to save my week. 

Through this journey, I have also come up with ways to slim down my cupcakes without sacrificing flavor. I use applesauce, in a lot of my cupcake recipes and everyone just love that they are moist but don’t even know I have decreased the fat. These changes I have made to my kitchen habits and daily exercise allows me to put my apron regularly and bake. I think it is important that my grandchildren see me baking and having a healthy relationship with it too.

 This has became such a passion that I am in the process of writing a Cupcake Cookbook with all my Cupcake Secrets inside!

-Lois