Hello there, Internet!

So, I just started a blog - finally, I guess. I figured there was enough random cookie and baking knowledge in my head over the past few years that I could share it with the world. I set a goal of writing in my blog just once a week, and we'll see how it goes.

I've always loved writing, so I can't imagine it'll be too difficult.

Just to give you a very short blurb about myself, I started cookie decorating about three years ago, now. And like a lot of cookie decorators, I started with things like cakes and cupcakes and whatnot. I still do these things, but I haven't delved into the world of sculpted, fondant covered, multiple tiered cakes. Instead, I decided to jump into decorated sugar cookies. And living in rural Southwestern Ontario, Canada, decorated sugar cookies were definitely an unheard of type of thing... people seemed really intrigued, though!

So I started doing live feeds on Facebook. People were messaging me and commenting, telling me how relaxing it was to watch and that they enjoyed it quite a lot, so I started making edited video tutorials, emphasis on one cookie and design at a time. All of a sudden, Buzzfeed Food got interested and did a video about me. And then a month later, they shared the same video on Tasty, too. I went from almost 200 followers on Instagram in December to 10.7k followers within just a few months. Plus noteable jumps in subscriptions, views, and likes on my YouTube channel, website, and Facebook page. That was definitely an interesting experience!

So now I've got all these new eyes on me, worldwide, so I guess I can't stop decorating sugar cookies, now can I? Honestly. I'm just glad that the eyes are on my cookies and not actually on me, because I'm a shy and quiet person that just keeps to themselves most of the time. That probably sounds mega-cliche, but it's true.

You ever seen the Simpsons episode where Homer keeps getting over-shadowed by the inanimate carbon rod? My inanimate carbon rod is my scribe tool, aka my pointy stick (okay, if you get the reference, I also watched Arthur a lot growing up...).

​But unlike Homer, I'm totally cool with this. All eyes on you, pointy stick! I don't even care. It can have all the fame and glamour of the interwebz...

I actually started out apprenticing at a local fine dining restaurant as a teenager (that's where I got my nickname, Kookie, actually), and went from living in a town of 8,000 people for my whole life to living in a city of 2.8 million people - the big smoke of Toronto - while I attended chef school. Definitely a huge change, that's for sure, but I wanted to do something more different than moving to London, a smaller city closer to home, like every other teenager seemed to do at the time.

Much like a lot of other people who attend college in their teenage years, though, I ended up doing something pretty unrelated to my schooling for a living. I've always been an artsy and creative kinda girl, so I picked up polymer clay sculpting one day and stuck at it for eight years under my alias of Monster Kookies. But I was missing home, and after a few years of living in a tiny basement apartment on the Danforth, I decided to move back to my oh-so-small-and-delightful home town.

As well as working part-time at a local candy store making gelato and chocolate (which I loved), I was basically sculpting all day and all night, doing custom orders, and having other folks on the internet ripping off every single one of my ideas. I put every last bit of myself into what I sculpted, and it burnt me right out. And not only that, I ended up losing my job after a tornado destroyed the candy store. It never re-opened.

I put Monster Kookies on the back burner, and eventually got a retail job at another local shop - periodically making chocolate, but mostly scooping ice cream and making lattes. I was definitely missing something. People would come into the store once in awhile and ask us to make a cake - it'd get pawned off on me because I was the creative one, and I was most definitely okay with that. Those were my little happy moments. I decided I needed more of those moments, so I quit to make that happen. And that's how Sweethart Baking Experiment was born.

So here I am, back at the beginning, having a written conversation with my computer and about to hit "POST". My first real blog entry: COMPLETE.