I'm married to a wonderful husband for 33 years and am a very blessed mother to 3 beautiful grown children (2 married daughters and 1 son who lives at home). I believe my love of cooking/baking blossomed from the love my mother poured into all the simple meals she prepared. I began cooking/baking at age 12. Besides preparing special meals for my family I enjoy planning, preparing and hosting gatherings for friends and family members that are centered around good food and fun! I not only love traditional family recipes and trying new recipes, I also enjoy creating my own recipes. But my true love is baking, custom cake decorating and confections. My youngest daughter is following in my footsteps. She loves to create new recipes and has decorated cakes of her own. My son has created a few new dishes/baked goods, as well. I also own my own baking business. Baking, making decadent desserts, sweets, and custom designed cakes are my specialty. But if there is one dish I love to cook it has to be venison chili, reason being I love to eat it! But it has to be ladled over macaroni and lots of American cheese! Other then that I enjoy making such a variety of flavors of food. Any dish that brings an expression of pure delight and happiness on someones face or in their voice when they take that first taste is at that moment my most favorite thing to cook. For New Years morning I prepare a breakfast of Eggs Benedict, Cinnamon Rolls, and Mimosas. Then the rest of the day we spend with our daughters, son and son-in-laws watching movies, playing games and grazing on what has been dubbed "the munchie meal". We prepare all sorts of finger foods and dips, hot and cold. Everyone chooses a few of their favorites to be made. Family birthdays are celebrated with my preparing the birthday persons favorite meal, from appetizers to dessert. Thanksgiving is of course the big turkey dinner with all the trimmings. I started preparing brine turkey about 5 years ago and it is now a new Thanksgiving tradition. My most favorite is Christmas when our family bakes and decorates sugar cookies together. And it would not be Christmas without all the cookies and homemade candies I make to share with family and friends. Designing, baking, constructing and decorating my first gingerbread house when I was 15. I used a basic gingerbread cookie recipe and other then that I did everything else without any instructions to follow. Baked and decorated my first tiered wedding cake (it had over 600 drop flowers on it). Preparing my first souffle and it didn't fall! Learning to alter recipes to be heart healthy for my husband and father, and sugar free for my daughter, including desserts which can be quite challenging. But my greatest triumph was the birth of my own custom designed cake/specialty pastry and confections business four years ago after having created custom cakes for the past 30+ years! A new recipe I tried when the kids were little. It was an Italian type chicken dish (but no tomatoes) that was baked with over 15 garlic cloves. That should have been my first clue that this would be a disaster! My poor husband took one bite and literally choked! Being the wonderful man he is he still ate it but did tell me to never ever make that awful dish again! I think our whole family had the smell of garlic coming out our pores for days! Two New Years ago while preparing the traditional Eggs Benedict I accidentally miss read my recipe for the Hollandaise sauce and put 3 times the amount of lemon juice. It was not edible to say the least and had to be dumped! Everyone was very disappointed. One of my earliest cooking tragedies was when I was about 12 years old and had a friend sleep over. At 1 am we decided to make homemade donuts. All went well until the grease caught fire. I've never tried making donuts since!