A baking and book blog
Why I chose this book The Coincidence of Coconut Cake….What is it about a coconut cake that brings your soul back down to earth and reminds you of warm summers on the back porch with your grandmother? Well for me that is because those are …
20 of the most amazing coconut dishes Coconut is an amazing food. It is the edible fruit of the coconut palm (Cocos nucifera), a tree of the palm family (Arecaceae). Coconuts probably originated somewhere in Indo-Malaya and are one of the most important crops of the tropics. Coconut flesh is high …
So… where did the name Bakeology.btx come from and how did it come to be? Well, it was a dream that I never knew I had until recently (thank you COVID-19!) I have always loved to bake. When I was a child I would spend my summers baking for family and friends who would drop off all the ingredients at my house and while they were at work I would bake them whatever goodie they had given me the fixen’s for.
As I grew older, my love of baking migrated somewhat into a love of learning about food and all things ‘sciency’. I even obtained my Bachelor’s of Science from the University of Texas in Nutrition which had a focus on Food Science. Learning about the chemistry behind food and how this affects its properties when cooking or baking became fascinating to me. I loved baking and now I love learning about baking.
Jump ahead to my adult life, I received my degree in 1996, became a Biology teacher in 2002 and I continue to nurture my love of learning while sharing that passion with my students. Teaching allows me to get my nerdy “science fix”, but had nothing to do with baking which had taken a back burner to my teaching career and being a wife and mom.
Fast forward to 2020 and the COVID-19 quarantine…the world is stressed and strained, and teachers are tired and struggling to help their students with what seemed like little to no success. This was the time that I reignited my passion for baking. It actually started with my youngest daughter who was a junior in high school at the time and in a culinary class. For her remote learning assignments she had to bake something. She asked for my help and well….as they say, the rest is history. The spark that had started when I was a child turned into a roaring bonfire. It became my ‘guilty pleasure’ and my escape from the turmoil of the world’s reality. My daughter completed her assignment and even began thinking about a career in baking. Not sure if that will pan out, but her urging my help showed me that I needed baking in my life.
Baking, and learning about baking brought me joy in a time when I desperately needed it. I began reading everything I could get my hands on regarding baking. Pinning recipes on Pinterest, watching tons of Tik Toks, youtube videos, and Insta reels that showed anything and everything to do with baking. Whenever I was deciding what to bake next I began hours of this ‘research’ before finally deciding on a new item to try. I think I enjoyed the research as much as the baking itself! I am also a person that loves a good challenge, so one of the first things that I wanted to conquer was macarons. My macaron journey consisted of hours upon hours of exploring recipes and methods, joining multiple Facebook groups, deciding on color and flavor, you name it…if it had to do with macarons I was reading it or watching it. I am horrible at making decisions and have discovered that my way of dealing with that is to just keep ‘researching’ it so as to not have to make a choice on something.
Finally, after a couple of months I worked up the nerve to try my first batch. It was a batch of red velvet macs with cream cheese frosting as the filling and they were a success. I remember giggling with excitement alongside my daughter when we were watching them bake that they “actually grew feet!!” That was a fun moment and it was that instant that the idea of expanding my love of baking into something more than what occurred in my kitchen became real.
It was very slow going…remember, I don’t make decisions easily. Choosing a name posed my first obstacle. I bet I had twenty different names. So, I did what I always do and I started to research how to choose a name…LOL! I read so many blogs about starting blogs that my head hurt. I was so indecisive on so many things. Did I want to only do baking? Should I include other areas of my life? What if it sounds silly? What happens if things change after I have chosen a niche? So many ‘what if’s’ that prolonged me from just picking a dang name. I knew that I wanted the name to not only be a reflection of me as a baker but also as someone who loves to learn about baking. So, Bakeology was always in the mix. It literally means “the study of baking”. It fit me perfectly but it was already taken. So, the quest continued. Then it dawned on me that I live in one of the cutest and most unique areas of Texas…. Brenham. Brenham is my home town, it was both of my parents and their families home town and is the place that I chose to raise my children. I’m proud to be from Brenham, Texas. I work in Brenham and love that I can call this town my home. So…..TA DAAAAHHHH “Bakeology.btx” was born! Welcome to the place where I will develop my love of learning into baking and hopefully create content that is worth a glance. Thank you for being a part of this journey with me!