My Mentor - Marilyn

I've been taking some baking lessons from a lovely lady named Marilyn.

She's a regular customer of The Spotted Frog Furniture Company - a beautiful boutique furniture and home decor store in Steveston co-owned by my very talented sister. Marilyn would come in every other day during her regular walks to Steveston and we would casually talk about the little things: the weather, new products, Starbucks, Steveston gossip, etc. Eventually we started revealing more personal things about ourselves and "cute little Asian lady with fisherman's hat who comes in at store opening everyday" as I dubbed her in my head had an actual name: Marilyn.

She is one of the reasons I started this baking frenzy.

Marilyn is a professional baker who started off doing it as a hobby. She's retired now, but at one point she made many wedding cakes for several big hotels downtown in addition to teaching lessons straight out of her home. The story of how it all came to be totally inspired me to actively start baking. Experimention here, wedding cakes for friends there, one massive 800 pound commerical Mix Master appliance later, and she was a little fireball baker.

I have always loved the idea of baking. I've been watching all the cake decorating shows on tv for years but never did any of it myself. There were always excuses...the most predominant one being that I was too busy. And if I were to be completely honest with myself, I haven't been truly busy in months. I ran out of excuses so the only thing left to do was initiate it.

So, I sucked it up, put a smile on my face, excitedly clapped my hands (a quirk I do when I'm happy) and asked Marilyn if I was able to take a few baking classes from her. She was more than happy to.

My first lesson was Cranberry & Pistachio Biscottis. She choose to teach me these first because she thought it would be a great little Christmas treat that I could give away to everyone. With the bits of red and green in the biscottis alongside a warm cup of coffee or tea, it was perfect!

After my lesson, I went home, rolled up my sleeves, and had a wack at it.

I'm actually very surprised at how well they turned out. Like...really surprised. I dipped one end of them into a lemon icing which I thought was fantastc as it offsets the tartness of the cranberries. My only baking blunder was that when I cut them into strips, the top kept on cracking making it look really messy. But otherwise, I was very happy.

And because I was on a roll, I decided to make some shortbread cookies on the whim. This batch really shocked me too. They came out super soft and oh-so-melt-in-your-mouth. I drizzled a little bit of white chocolate on them to add some texture.

So with the biscottis and shortbread cooling, I decided to make lemon squares. All my ingredients were out already and I was totally on a roll!

These turned out okay. It was a bit on the sour side so I think I added too much lemon. But overall, for my first try and doing completely on the fly (haha, I'm so funny, I should write children's books), it was pretty good. 2/3 isn't too shabby. 4 hours of baking fun!

Parchment paper, by the way, is wonderful. It's so useful! I noticed Marilyn was using it during my lesson and decided to pick up a box not knowing how versatile it is. I used it to sift my dry ingredients on, cool my biscottis after diping it with icing, and made a little fancy piping bag to drizzle the shortbread. Such a handy little tool!