My first introduction to dessert (or my earliest memory) was sitting on my kitchen floor as a little kid, taking turns hand whisking cheesecake batter to get the cream cheese lumps out with my siblings. I grew up with Kraft peanut butter cookies (the recipe on the back of the jar), watching cooking shows after school, and boxed cake mixes (I loved admiring the shelf displays at grocery stores). I always had a sweet tooth (and still do, I’ll pick dessert as my meal any day). It wasn’t until I got older I started using baking as a way to procrastinate studying. I was an honor roll student up until the academic burnout hit while pursuing an IT degree I very quickly realized I had no interest in. There were a lot of baking fails during that era, and my Mom told me so many times I wasn’t allowed back in the kitchen because I was wasting so many of her ingredients. You see, my issue was I couldn’t follow a recipe. I would jump ahead and tweak and experiment even though it was my first time making that dessert to begin with (look at me foreshadowing recipe development). For some reason those failures didn’t stop me and the more I dwelled into baking and sweets, the more interested I was with the way desserts were made, how ingredients worked together, and how cinematic recipe videos could be. Looking back it makes a lot of sense since I loved to play kitchen, and an Easy-Bake Oven was my dream toy (that I never got but I did inherit my sisters’ old Mrs.Fields version of it)!
As the youngest daughter I was always around my Mom watching her cook. Sometimes she would just let me stand there, other times she would tell me what she was putting in and how much. My Mom is THE family chef, like I’m talking throughout my extended family and family friends everyone knows she’s the one with taste in her hands. They say she passed it down to me which she did, and I cherish that as the designated family baker. As well as someone who embraces my Pakistani culture by expressing those flavors through new takes on desserts.
I’ve always been a creative person and used different methods to express that; drawing and art, poetry and writing, fashion and styling, and then videography and photography with content creation. One day I decided to actually pursue the baking ideas in my head and well, here we are, with probably my most passionate creative outlet yet. I’ve never loved anything as much as I love recipe development and capturing baking content. My thought process with every dessert I eat begins with “how can i make this better” because (like 90% of the time) it always can be.
My cake business, Annie’s Bake Shoppe, started out as a project for an elective I was taking in university in the peak of the 2020 COVID lockdown (believe it or not). I made a letter cake for my Mom’s birthday, and everyone was so impressed with it. It was actually my sister who really pushed me and said “Annie you have to sell these” (Annie is my childhood nickname) and I said why not give it a try, I have to pursue some kind of creative project for this class anyways. Turning that into a profitable business was crazy, still continuing this business 6 years later is crazy, and maybe what’s crazier is I wholeheartedly believe I’ll turn it into a proper cafe with a storefront one day. And hopefully, that one day is someday soon …