Welcome to my little slice of the internet! My name is Katie and I am infatuated with sugar and pretty stuff that you can eat. I first learned to navigate a kitchen by watching my mother and grandmother. I grew up in North Pole, Alaska and we had a large garden so a lot of what we ate was hand-made by these magnificent women. My Grammy made the best bread ever! My mom’s pie crust was legendary and she always went the extra mile and a half to make everything look too good to eat.

I lost my mother just before I turned 18 after a year-and-a-half-long battle with her medical issues. At this time, my family also became scattered and baking became a way for me to stay grounded and connected to my mom. I spent years wandering between Alaska and California, working dead-end jobs in retail. I made my way to Colorado in 2010 and was able to create a fresh start for myself. I enrolled in college as a Psychology major, met an amazing man, and finally started to get my life onto a track I could be proud of. When my now husband and I bought our first home in 2013 and started talking about having a family, I decided to take some cake decorating classes at a local craft store so that our future children would always have the best birthday cakes. Being as I am the fourth out of five children and my birthday falls a month after Christmas, and 3 weeks after one of my sister’s, my celebration always felt like an afterthought, and I was adamant that my child would never feel that way on their special day.

I was hooked on fondant, gumpaste, and buttercream. I started watching way too much YouTube and finding any excuse I could to make cake for people. I got pregnant in early 2014, and my daughter was born in December 2014. I continued to work toward my degree while staying at home with my mini-me. In 2017, my estranged father was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer so we took him into our home and I started managing his care and treatment. He lost his battle with cancer in May of 2017. During the few months he lived with us, I was still in university online full-time and my daughter was only 2 years old. I found solace in baking once again. It was epiphany time. I realized that academic life was not for me and I just wanted to play with sugar and make people happy with my sweet creations so I got a job to support my cake decorating tool habit and started working towards improving my skills to a more professional level.

A little over a year after my father passed away, my husband took a job that allowed us the financial freedom to send me to pastry school. So, in October 2018, I chef-coated up and hunkered down for an intensive baking and pastry program. I was the same age that Julia Child was when she went to Le Cordon Bleu, so obviously I was destined for greatness. I reveled in my new-found sense of purpose. Every new technique I learned was like fireworks going off in my head. I went on to work in some of the most popular restaurants in Boulder County including Dushanbe Teahouse and The Huckleberry, as well as an established catering company, but I wasn’t able to make cake the way I wanted to in these positions. As 2020 dawned, an opportunity to rent a kitchen came up that I couldn’t pass on, so I started the process of becoming an independent caker doing custom orders only.

My kitchen lease started on March 1st, 2020, and we all know what happened later that month: COVID-19 lockdowns started. My daughter’s preschool closed for 2 months straight, so I became a stay-at-home mom instead of opening my cakery. In the summer of 2021, I went back to work as the executive pastry chef for a catering company and started to squirrel away funds and make plans for my cakery, version 2.0. Then, on December 30th, 2021, the Marshall Fire tore through our neighborhood. Many of our neighbors lost their homes and every single possession they had. We were unfortunately fortunate in that our house was standing after the fire but had sustained heat damage and severe smoke damage. We ended up fighting for almost 2 full years to get our house remediated, which necessitated gutting it down to the studs and building it back up. I stepped out of my position to better serve my family and to deal with the seemingly endless paperwork and contractor meetings. Volunteering to make birthday cakes for kids who had lost their homes in the fire kept me mostly sane during this time. I also got into making paint-your-own sugar cookies for neighborhood clean-up celebrations and discovered two new loves: sugar cookie decorating and the amazing community which I am honored to call home. The outpouring of support in the wake of the Marshall Fire’s devestation still continues to amaze me over two years after the event.

We ended up throwing away almost everything we owned because we were not willing to take risks with our child’s health. The stress of the reconstruction is still not over as we are now having to take legal action against the contractors that did our reconstruction. In an effort to stay fully present for my family as we navigate the continuing aftermath, I am here now, back home, and have decided to work under the Cottage Foods Act, so here is a final pivot: Katie the Caker has become Katie the Cookier.

Being formally trained in pastry and working in the industry, as well as being a lifelong lover of food, has given me a deep appreciation of flavor and texture. My passion for color, visual texture and balance, attention to detail, flights of wit and whimsy, closely monitored perfectionism and obsessive Pintrest-ing are now being applied to designing cookies. I consider myself a pastry chef first and a decorator second because what is the point in spending hours prettying something up if it doesn’t taste even better than it looks? The road that has lead me here was long and winding and the ride was a bit bumpier than I would have preferred, but here I am, chef coat on, smile on my face, and love in my heart ready to celebrate individuality, community, and the synergy that comes when every person is able to be themselves and come together to create a whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

“The people who give you their food give you their heart.” - Cesar Chavez