Life before the cloud….
Me as a bakery owner and custom cake designer before smashing upon the scene as a Solutions Architect!
Before I became a Solutions Architect, helping customers understand and identify the value of the cloud for their businesses, I was building my own business creating custom wedding cakes, baking delicious cookies, and leading an amazing team of trusted cake advisors. For over 18 years, I built my reputation around not only delicious, beautiful custom creations but first-rate customer service as well. As my clients came in with their ideas and themes of what they wanted, we fulfilled their dreams and created far beyond what they thought possible!
With recipes passed down from family and people I met, as well as custom recipes curated by me for my customers’ taste buds, people from all over the world heard about us and traveled as a destination to my small bakery in Huntsville, Texas. Visitors from England, Germany, Italy, Canada, Iran, Australia, and all parts of the USA.
With only 368 square feet to work with, we used every square inch of the floor, walls, and even some of the ceiling! We baked everything from our famous banana bread, delicious chocolate chip cookies, cinnamon rolls, and mixed berry handpies to custom-designed, one-of-a-kind cakes. On a typical day, we created a variety of cupcake flavors, including triple chocolate, salted caramel, wedding cake, and espresso!
Swiss meringue buttercream, a favorite among some but a less-liked option for others, stands in stark contrast to its American buttercream counterpart. It boasts a buttery richness, a milder sweetness, and a cloud-like lightness that sets it apart. I adored this buttercream, but could understand why others didn't care for it. Trying to win people over to my side of love for this frosting, I curated a special recipe. One that was still just as light and airy, not sickly sweet, but a little sweeter with an amazing aftertaste that made you beg for more!
This is the frosting that topped the Salted Caramel cupcake. A scratch made caramel cake, topped with caramel buttercream swirled with decadent caramel, topped with more caramel drizzle and Italian sea salt . Customers would stand at the front counter, literally licking the paper to get every last drop of this special Caramel Swiss meringue frosting. The thing about this frosting is that it was usually made a specific way, a specific method. Heat the egg whites, melt the granulated sugar, whip the egg whites, add the butter in small chunks then whip some more until you have a glorious, silky smooth, shiny buttercream!
It was amazing, but also time consuming. Sometimes it was difficult for others to master, making it more work for fewer who could master it. After a while of using the traditional method, mixing the way it had always been done I decided enough was enough. Yes, its over a hundred years in the making, generation after generation had always done it this way. That makes it the only right way right? Wrong.
Thinking outside the box, I created a method of making this buttercream that enabled anyone to make it with ease while retaining the same silky smooth light texture and amazing flavor. My new method also made it easier to make additions, changes, and create new flavors with little effort. I created a pipeline that sped up the process that anyone could walk in and take over in the middle of.
My quest for improvement extended to various bakery processes, where I adopted a fresh perspective. I dared to challenge the status quo, aiming for increased efficiency, resilience, and reliability. Little did I realize how much the bakery life would prepare me for cloud life!
The bakery experience taught me a valuable lesson: tradition should never stifle innovation. Simply because something has been done a certain way for generations doesn’t mean it’s the sole approach. Often, when we view familiar tasks from a new angle, unburdened by established norms, we uncover fresh, efficient methods, achieve unprecedented resilience, and realize the ease of implementing previously unimagined changes.
