I am a working wife and mom. Whenever I get the time, I like to keep my house and bake up wonderful surprises. While I would love to do this full time, I am a business woman year round except Thanksgiving and Christmas. I ADORE breakfast food and desserts, specifically, breads. I guess because I am a wicked-good baker! Another passion of mine is baking pies. I worked for a regional grocery chain about 15 years ago in a bakery making beautiful doughnuts and breads. It was there that I fell in love with the marriage of art and science at work in the world of baking. Now my meat and veggie preparation, well, that's another story. I am a work in progress there. But as time rolls on I get better and better. We go berzerk baking cakes, pies and making candies from Thanksgiving up until Christmas. Every one of the pies that I prepare is a triumph to me, especially when I watch my family and friends take their first bite and close their eyes and just taste. A loooong long time ago, I attempted my first "by myself" baking experiment. It was me, Mom's Betty Crocker Cookbook, and the laws of substitutions. I had decided to make lemon squares to surprise my mom when she came home from work. As I went through the ingredients, I found that we hardly had any of them. But I remembered my mother telling me once that you can make substitutions in an emergency. So I replaced baking powder with baking soda, thought it was extremely cool when the lemon juice fizzled up over the sides of the bowl when I added it, and then cried my eyes out when I took them out of the oven. They had baked into concrete and smelled and tasted terrible. The dog wouldn't even eat them.