Hi, my name is Aaron Cannon. I'm a recent college grad living in Cincinnati just trying to figure out how to do life as an "adult." This is the story of how I discovered the joy of cooking and baking.
It all started in 2016. I had just finished my freshman year at Cedarville University and was returning home (Michigan) to look for my first summer job as a college student. I had some hopes of getting an internship but there weren't many opportunities for sophomores. I had started looking for various jobs around my area: Home Depot, restaurants, movie theaters. Nothing worked out.
I was probably about a month into my Summer and was starting to get a little desperate. One day I was browsing through job listings on Indeed and came across one for a bakery assistant with no experience required. I figured why not and sent in my application, knowing that most applications probably wouldn't get a response. Within a week I got a call to set up an interview. I went in and really enjoyed the interview but highly doubted I would get the job. Instead within a day or two I got an offer.
I spent the rest of the Summer working at an Italian pastry shop (Cantoros Italian Market) filling Cannolis, assembling cakes, and baking cookies. It wasn't an easy job- standing and doing a lot of repetitive motions put a lot of strain on my back. But I absolutely loved the people I got to work with. And the tasting benefits weren't so bad either. But now looking back I realized that's where it all started. I definitely learned a lot of lessons and recipes from working there, but most of all I gained a passion for making food, even though I didn't fully realize it yet. All I knew at the time was that I could actually make edible food that sometimes even tasted alright. This was the spark for my food adventures.
For the next two years I don't think I baked or cooked a single thing. Just never really had the opportunity or need to. For the most part I was too busy with school and during the Summer I was working at my internship and living with my parents. This all changed the Summer of 2018 when I got an internship in Indianapolis, about 4 hours from home.
This was my first time without my Mom's homemade food or my school's cafeteria. I was going to have to learn to make my own food. As a whole my roommates I kept things pretty simple. We had a few staples: frozen burgers, quesadillas, pasta, chicken, but nothing terribly fancy. We would all get home from work and just try to "survive" (it wasn't really that bad though). By the end of the Summer what I had was a short list of recipes I knew I could go to once I graduated from school. This both gave me confidence and excitement for when I would make that transition.
Another highlight of the Summer was our workplace's baking competition. The four of us worked at a small software development company called EduSource. It was an amazing company and internship for a number of reasons but perhaps most of all because of their fantastic culture. One aspect of that culture was their annual baking competition. Being a smaller company I figured I could make something at least competitive (I still had all my recipes from the Italian pastry shop I worked at).
For round one I created my own take on cheesecake: cupcake size cheesecakes with chocolate chip cookie crusts and a raspberry on top. Now, the cheesecake itself was totally overcooked (I was hardly an expert baker). But I think by the uniqueness and overall presentation I qualified for the finale.
For the finale I decided to go all in. I made cream puffs dipped in chocolate and covered in sprinkles. I nailed the cream (which I made from scratch) and the presentation, but the puffs themselves didn't quite come out right (again, not an expert baker yet). I was definitely proud of my creation and ended up getting second place. The person who bested me pulled out a trump card and made chocolate truffles. No question, he deserved to win.
Either way the competition was a blast and it was my first time baking something since working at Cantoros. This Summer had definitely ignited something in me.
Fast-forward a year and I'm now graduating college and getting ready for life in the real world. I couldn't think of a better title for this stage of my journey than "fire". As a whole, my first year of adulting was definitely a trial by fire. There were hard times and good times and they were all used to grow me more as a person. On the positive side of things, my love for making food was fanned into a fire. I didn't have much of a choice really.
I had resolved to both eat healthily and enjoy what I was eating. This meant not relying on takeout or frozen meals. I started out with my staples from the previous Summer. I had some basic meals I enjoyed which I could go to. Then I started periodically introducing something new into the rotation. Homemade chili. Homemade pizza. Casserole. Soup. I made cheesecake again (still overcooked it). My list of recipes I was comfortable with started to grow, as did my skills and my adventurousness.
In October of 2019, my church small group had a Holloween party that also included a baking competition. And I now knew the secret to winning baking competitions- make chocolate truffles. And so I did: dark chocolate truffles dipped in white chocolate and decorated as eyeballs. They turned out amazing. Didn't win the competition (I think the decorations scared people away, which I thought was the point of Holloween). Either way, people started knowing me as someone who baked and cooked.
Christmas time came and gave me an opportunity to think about what my 2020 would look like. I looked back on all I had learned and everything I had enjoyed in 2019. One idea that had popped into my head was to start a food blog. At first, I wanted to start off really simple. I didn't want to set so high a bar for myself that I would completely stop enjoying the process of making food. But I really wanted to share with others not only the joy of cooking and baking but also that it wasn't something you needed to be afraid of. I figured that if someone like me could make food that generally tasted good then it was possible for anyone. My goal with this blog was just to inspire people to jump in and get started discovering and building their food-making skills and passion. It's really cool to see how far I've come over the years and really excited to find out what's next.
I hope that wherever you are, this blog can encourage you to push your limits and fire up your joy for homemade food.
Enjoy!