Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Everybody, welcome to the show.
Dara.
[00:00:04] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Thanks for. Thanks for being on here.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I thank you for allowing me to share my story, and it's a pleasure to finally meet you. Although virtually, it's nice to put a face to the name Heck, yeah.
[00:00:23] Speaker A: So for the uninitiated, for those who don't know, who are you and what do you do?
[00:00:29] Speaker B: So more than anything, I am a mama. I have two beautiful, amazing kids, and I'm also a wife to an equally amazing husband who also happens to be my business partner, which is fascinating, but we make it work.
Um, you know, second to the family stuff, I am the instructor and part heart of the pipe Peony Academy. I say part heart because Tim, my husband, shares the other part of that heart with our business. The Pipini Academy is. It's our baby. It's our third baby.
It's a thriving global. We are everywhere. We are all over the world. It's a buttercream flower piping school. School where literally anyone, give me a beginner, give me a grandma, give me a pastry chef. We can teach you how to not only make beautiful cakes, cupcakes, whatever. We can teach you to pipe flowers that look so realistic. And when I say pipe, we're using buttercream here. We're not using fondant. We're not using sugar paste. This is actual edible stuff.
No offense to anyone out there using sugar paste, but we can teach you how to pipe flowers that basically look like they grew out of the ground, but they're on your cupcake and you get to eat them. You don't have to keep them alive. There are no strings attached to what you make at the Academy.
[00:02:03] Speaker A: That's first of all, amazing. Second of all, I literally have no idea what any of that stuff is because I don't have a creative bone in my body, like, for any kind of physical creation. And when. When I. Like when Tim and I. And shout out to. To Tim, when Tim and I were. Were talking about what you do, I was like, whoa, that's amazing. And then I had to go to Monica, my wife, and be like, what. What is any of this stuff? And then she was. She was like, oh, that's so cool. And she's explaining it to me. I was like, oh, okay, I get it.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: Thanks.
[00:02:34] Speaker A: Monica, can you please explain? So now I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions, but right from the. From like the get go, like, just tell us about what does the business actually do? So if someone was like, engaging with you, what would they, what would be, what would they be getting? What would the experience be like? What would be the, the thing that they would be connecting with you about?
[00:02:57] Speaker B: Okay, so I'm just curious, I'm going to tell you basically what our business is. You come to our website, www.thepipini.com, you sign up and I'm going to tell you what you get. And I want you to kind of just guess how much you're going to end up paying for it. Right? Like it could be, could be $1, it could be free, it could be $1,000.
[00:03:22] Speaker A: So it's like not beyond 1,000 prices, right?
[00:03:24] Speaker B: You're going to price exactly.
[00:03:26] Speaker A: Okay. Okay.
[00:03:26] Speaker B: Come on down. I ram. Okay. So basically when you join the Pipini Academy, you start off, everyone, every single person starts off with a free seven day trial. And that's just physically we are feeling each other out.
I want you to be able to get into the website, you have access to everything, which I'll tell you what that is in a minute because I want you to get a very good feel for what you're diving into and I want you to make sure that it's right for you. Because I am who we am and we offer what we offer.
So you need to make that calculus that it's what you want to invest your time in.
So once you get in, you're in your seven day free trial. Cancel at any time.
You have access to 200, over 200 flower piping and cake and cupcake decorating classes.
75% of those classes are professionally filmed. We have a film crew come into my kitchen. You know, it's right now we film once a month. We film all of our classes, you know, in a day. It's a long day. Usually the kids are at school and around 2 o' clock I'm to my, to my film guy, I'm like, Matt, I gotta run to the bus stop to grab my kids, like eat your sandwich. And then we'll, you know, reconvene when I get back.
And the kids like, they'll sit and they'll watch me do it and they, they love it. And sometimes I'll catch my daughter up in her room like pretending to be making, you know, classes and it's so sweet.
So you get access to 200, over 200 classes which include everything from flower piping to getting a smooth coating on a cake, which is a big one because there are so many people out there who just want to make a good looking cake for their kids. Parties for their husband. They just want to make a cake that doesn't look like it, like, rolled down a hill and into a bush.
And I have a class on how to get the smoothest buttercream facade you will ever see. So you can have that. You can have, you know, all our flower piping classes, I model all of our flower piping techniques after real, actual flowers. So these flowers actually have names. So you want to pipe a ranunculus. I don't know if that means anything to you, but it's there. If you want to pipe a peony, it's there. A scabiosa, it's there. We have all of it. And then you get access to all of my recipes, which it's. They are my personal recipes that I've made that I feed my children.
I, you know, every special event that comes up, I say to my kids, okay, what's the cake this year? My son, Chocolate lover. Chocolate. Mom, more chocolate, please. Chocolate. So it's a chocolate cake with thick chocolate gadash, and sometimes I'll throw, like, raspberry jam in there or something to, you know, try to inject some vitamins and minerals into his birthday cake. But he sniffs that out instantly. He's like, this year, mom, no raspberry jam. Okay, fair enough. You know, so that all those recipes are in there. Chocolate, raspberry or chocolate lemon vanilla, buttercream flour piping recipes. So, you know, the buttercream consistency really, really, really matters. And if you don't have the correct consistency of buttercream, you're not. No matter how good your technique and your skill, you will never pipe a really nice buttercream flour. So I have really good buttercream for piping recipes in there. I have good frosting recipes. So you get all of my personal recipes that I use.
And then the real. The real shining star of the pipe peony academy is the Facebook group.
Now, I.
I feel like Facebook group. Facebook support groups for online learning is usually underplayed, like, okay, great. Like, I get this group. I get to, you know, see what other people are doing.
People don't really see the value in it. But this Facebook group is completely different because at the core of what we do, connection is so important to me. It is so important to me personally. But professionally, in having an online academy, you need to be able to connect with your members, with your students.
So I put a lot of effort into making sure that. That the Facebook community is a creative enterprise that people feel like they have a part of, and what that ends up being is you join the Facebook group. You log in, you know, you introduce yourself if you want to. You don't have to, but people hop onto it and say, welcome, welcome. I do. I'm like, thank you for being here. I appreciate you being here. You have issues. Say you're making a recipe and something is screwed up. Hop onto the Facebook community group. I can. My buttercream is melting, which is a common issue. I can't get my petals to attach to anything. They're all flopping down and it's a horrible mess. What do I do?
Everybody answers. I personally answer. I take a lot of time to actually respond to each individual post. I do it once a day. I'll hop on in the morning. I've got my coffee, my 24 ounces of coffee, whatever number cup I'm on, and I'll sit down and I'll really. I'll see someone's problem and I'll try to understand, okay, like what. What's the issue here? Like, let's cut through the noise.
Let's get to the core issue and then let's troubleshoot it together. And I'll often ask for pictures. You know, give me pictures, Give me a video. Give me. Give me a visual so I can see your struggle, so I can really help you get through it. People will often post, you know, pictures of, like, projects that they were so, so excited that they could do. And I actually, this is how I gauge success. I gauge success by the quality of the projects that are being posted. And especially if someone posts like, this was my first cake, and this is my cake now. I'm like, yes. Like, hell, yeah. Like, you were making that and now you're making that. And that is an amazing feeling for you, but for me too, like, that fills my bucket. So I love when people post things. I'm. I'm always there to give that a girls that a boys.
Everyone in the group does that, and it.
The community can stand on its own. It is such a beautiful piece of online existence.
So you get all of that for this is. Come on down.
[00:10:04] Speaker A: $35 a month.
[00:10:07] Speaker B: $15 a month. Close. Okay, we start. We started out at 10, and then once we transition to a different platform, a new website, professional filming, we upped it to 15, and 15 is where we will remain because I think that it's important to make something like this accessible to everyone who wants to learn it out there. Currently, there are, you know, other tutorials. There's obviously your free stuff that you find on YouTube, and then there's the stuff that you pay for, but they tend to be on the pricier side.
And I happen to think that if I can make a product that's more affordable, volume will make us grow. Just people coming to us saying, you know, I don't want to pay $200 for six classes. Okay, come on over. We've got 200 classes for $15.
So.
[00:11:04] Speaker A: Heck yeah. I have all sorts of questions. The first one is going to demonstrate that I am, you know, that I don't have any background in this.
I in generality understand what flower piping is. But like, can you explain it and also to whatever level you can like just tell us kind of like the background, like where it came from, like how popular is it, like in modern times, any of that?
[00:11:30] Speaker B: Yeah. So flower piping is taking buttercream. I wish I should have brought, I should have brought a visual like a bag or something. But it's taking buttercream at the very base of it and shoving the buttercream in a bag with a piping tip and you push on the bag and it comes out.
And flower piping is basically manipulating that buttercream into flour flower.
So, you know, you're piping all of your petals in the way that they would naturally look on a flower and you end with something that looks like a flower and then you put it on a cake or a cupcake and then you give it to someone.
What really flower piping really got me. And it's really a strange happening in my life because I actually did not start off as a baker. I am not a chef. I will not put on a white coat and prance around my kitchen like I am.
I funny story.
I actually was a terrible baker. I was not.
I was good at, I was good at making dinners and lunches. I'll whip up a salad like you will not believe. It'll be delicious.
But when it came to baking, I was not a baker. My mother in law was the baker in the family.
So whenever we wanted a cake, we would, we would go to grandma for, you know, for the cake. And she's a fabulous baker, by the way, so I'm not a big fan of redundancy. We've got grandma. We don't need me. So it was just, just something that I never really was passionate about.
And then 2020 Covid hits and things changed like they did for a lot of people.
My nephew was having a birthday party and my sister didn't feel comfortable going and getting, you know, to the grocery store, basically.
And I'M like, you know what? Like, let me, let me make him cupcakes. Like, make him some cupcakes. Like, I am good in the kitchen. I can make this work. I know I can make this work.
So I made him the most rudimentary, jacked up, blimpy cupcakes that I have.
I mean, like, just looking at old pictures of these things and I share these pictures openly in my videos. I'm like, guys, like, like, you think you're starting from a place of zero. I'm starting from a place of negative 20. Like, look at these things.
And it. Being in the kitchen making the cupcakes, piping the little blue swirls that turned everyone's mouth all sorts of colors was so therapeutic for me. And I couldn't stop thinking about it. It lit such a fire in my belly that I would literally wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it. Like, wow, I really like that.
And that was during a time where you're just digging for joy during COVID Like, you are. You know, my daughter started kindergarten that year, which is a horrible time to, you know, for the kids to start school during a pandemic. The silver lining was that Tim was home from work, which we were grateful for. That was our big silver lining of. From COVID But I just, I lost a lot of myself during COVID And making these stupid flippy cupcakes brought me back. Like, it gave me something to be excited about, something to, you know, put my energy into other. Other than my children.
So I woke up and I'm like, you know what? I'm just gonna work on this. Like, I'm just gonna. Just gonna see what I can do with this. And I woke up and I started practicing and I started looking online and like, cupcake decorations and I came across buttercream flowers.
Buttercream flowers are out there.
They're, you know, you find various levels of good various there you find all kinds of buttercream flowers. And I found them and I was like, wow, what a gift. What a gift to give someone, you know, because flowers, they say so much. They say they're so beautiful. And there's not one person in this world where if you have flowers sitting on your counter, it doesn't uplift you just a tiny bit. It may slightly aggravate you because you're like, okay, like, once these things die, I'm going to need to do something with them. But they're uplifting and they're sweet and they're sentimental and their nature. And I just thought to myself, how could you improve a flower?
These buttercream flowers, like, this is what it's meant to be. But they don't look real, right? Like, the ones that I was coming across, they didn't look real.
And I'm like, I actually said in the moment to myself, what would it take to become the best at this?
You know, what would it take to become the best in the world at flower piping? And I fantasized about it. I, you know, thought about it and I'm like, can I do this?
And I checked myself. I'm like, do you want to do this? This is strange. Can't you just put this effort into running a marathon or. But I'm like, no. Like, this has purpose to me. This is a beautiful gift for someone that can, you know, make someone's day and also feed them. And I, I love this. I love that I could make a cake for my daughter and just pour my whole heart into it. And for the rest of her life, she'll always think, my mom made my cakes and they were beautiful. And whether or not they actually were beautiful because I made some, some duds. Like, I surely had my fair share of duds, but they always thought they were beautiful, and it was because I put effort into them and it made them feel loved.
So buttercream flowers was really born out of a love of nature and seeing a purpose for flowers and a love of giving gifts with sentiment and adding value in the form of food to, you know, a special occasion. So did I answer all your questions? I don't know if I hit everything I do that I trail, so you have to forgive me.
[00:17:57] Speaker A: I'll add. I'll go back to a couple of the questions there, but I'll just add in. So during COVID and not just for Covid, but so during situations that are long term stressful, human beings have this backup system called the long long term stress response. And the long term stress response has three elements to it. So there's the alarm stage, the resistance stage, and the exhaustion stage. And you can imagine it kicks in around like 6ish weeks of, like, prolonged stress. And it could be, like, sooner than that if you're just kind of like eyeballing it. Being in the resistance phase of the long term stress response, it sounds bad, but it's actually a good thing. So it means that there's this, like, overwhelming pronounced stress restraint that you got to work through. And psychologically, our, our, our bodies and our minds are right on the edge of our seat. We can, like, Collaborate more. We can be more creative, we can like work longer, we can focus longer. So it's this really, really useful thing because it's. The intent is like just to help us go further so that we can work our way out of this really, really stressful situation. But there's also some really negative parts of it. And the negative parts are of it is it creates what I refer to as closed circuit thinking. So like when you go to bed at night, you wake up and you wake up ruminating about things that you can't solve by thinking. And the whole intent, the psychological intent, is to get you out of bed so that you start doing stuff. And then there's like a soothing, like if you start doing emails or doing work that, that soothes that anxiety. And then your mind has tricked you into like getting more work hours in.
So the reason I'm talking about this is like during COVID most of us were in the resistance phase after about six weeks. And we stayed in that resistance phase for a long time. And it's good, right? It's good just in the sense of like, you're attacking the problem and you're busy and you're doing stuff.
But there's that next phase that comes in which is exhaustion. And being. Crossing from resistance into exhaustion is an interesting thing. I refer to it as walking through a misty field. And you can walk through a misty field, but at some point there's a sharp and steep drop where you go into what is referred to as a severe burnout. And in that place, when you have all of this, like long term stress and each day kind of blends into the next and the blends in the next and it doesn't seem to be like, what is the end point here?
Eventually people, when they're walking through that misty field, they start to fall and don't even realize they're falling, but they're falling. And when you talk about that, like lost, you know, lost part of yourself and like lost, like a sense of purpose. It was such a common thing during that time.
And one of the things that I would coach people on and ask people to do is I would say, you've got to disrupt. And when I say disrupt, it doesn't mean like some totally, like, I'm gonna like, start all new friendships or anything. Kind of like ridiculous. What I'd encourage people to do is, hey, if you always had a book that you wanted to write, start writing that book. If you ever wanted to learn how to play guitar, learn how to play guitar. Oh, did you Want to learn a language, You've always kind of fantasized about it. Go do that. The idea is that when you disrupt your thought patterns by taking on a new skill or building a new thing, it actually is a perspective builder, and it reminds you that there's a world outside of your current suffering. So when people start getting into that exhaustion phase, it's as if they're holding up, you know, the tube that's in the middle of a roll of kitchen paper.
So imagine closing one eye and then looking through that tube.
When you're getting into the exhaustion phase, your understanding of a larger perspective of the world is reduced, and you can only see what's right in front of you. And what's in front of you is often like, suffering, pain, difficulty, all that.
And people who they are starts to kind of fade in the background, and you just kind of caught in this quicksand of experience.
But if you disrupt that through learning a new skill and discovering a new passion and really investing yourself in it, it actually opens up your other eye, it gets rid of the tube, and it reminds you of this world. Now, I don't want to say that's what your experience is, but what you described sounds like it might be connected to that.
[00:22:14] Speaker B: That's really interesting. Do you find that people will automatically disrupt themselves, or do they need to be prompted to disrupt and to move on to something that can give them kind of open up their, you know, their tunnel vision, open up their.
Their scope of what they're seeing and how they're feeling?
[00:22:37] Speaker A: I think it's not common for people during prolonged periods of strain to disrupt themselves.
And it's not that it's totally alien because you did it yourself, but what happens is people either fall into old habits of how they take care of themselves, which are good things. Like. So, for example, my wife is a yoga therapist, and she has, like, a yoga practice. So she would be doing yoga. Or I've been someone who does, like, a lot of running. So, like, you know, I'd be running. But the thing is, during times of prolonged stress, they might help you maintain a baseline of health and activity and all of that.
But if you took that thing and you just did it in a different way. So, for example, let's say I'm running. What if I just went to a different part of the city that I'm not familiar with and I run there? Or instead of running in the city, why don't I try trail running? Or why don't I run at a different time of day? So I have a different kind of experience. So having a pattern of how you take care of yourself, like an activity that you take care of yourself is great, but trying it in a different way that, again, creates more of a disruption, is like a thing that actually kind of is a perspective builder or setting an audacious task for you. Like, oh, you know, I'm comfortable running like, three miles, but now I'm actually going to get comfortable running, like, half marathons. That's my goal for right now. Great. That's a disruptor. Right.
So what I'd find is during that time, people kind of were sticking with things that they'd use to take care of themselves, but it almost became like medicating themselves. And, you know, most medications over time, they can. Not most, but many can reduce in effectiveness over time. Right. If you've got, like a prolonged thing. Not all, but many. But the flip side is that people weren't doing anything. They were becoming so hyper focused on work because the workday didn't have a beginning or end.
And a lot of people had their families in the house now. So they were retracting socially because there wasn't, like, social space. So people were exercising less, doing less of their passions, connecting to other people more. And people became more and more and more insular, which, again, it's like that tube, but maybe even that tube with a magnifying glass on it. And then all you're focused on is that quicksand of the experience that you're having. And again, perspective is gone. So part of why I started talking about this stuff so much in my work with organizations was to kind of give people that shot in the arm. Like, no, go write that book. Even if that book stinks. Like, even if it's like you look back a year later, you're like, oh, that's embarrassing. That's fine, go do it. Go write a song. Go write a record. Call up someone that you haven't spoken to in 10 years and reconnect with them. If you have some, like, outlying beef with someone, like, go and fix that right now. Because part of that whole thing is, like, break up what you've got going on so you can create that. So when I hear your story here at Lauren, like, not just learning about flower piping, but of being like, oh, what would it take to become the absolute best on that? It's like you. You knew to do that without someone explicitly telling you to do that to. To find that purpose and meaning. So I find it's a. It's A really interesting part of the story.
[00:25:48] Speaker B: I guess I've just always believed that if you are passionate about something, you can go so far with it. Like, you can take it as far as you want to go with it. And at that point in my life, I, you know, I never thought of it as a disruptor. And what you said was really interesting. I was essentially looking for another point in my life that could provide me joy because I lost some of the joy during COVID So this was a new bucket, a new challenge that was totally, you know, and maybe it kind of corresponded with the severity of being in a pandemic. Like, okay, like, I need something shocking to, like, make this all better.
And I found a new bucket to fill, and it was flower piping. And I'm like, okay, if I'm gonna do this, like, I.
I want to do it. Like, I want to take it as far as, like, my soul is willing to take it within, you know, within limit. So, yeah, that's just how it kind of started and evolved and, you know, to what it is today. And never in my wildest dreams did I think that we would have what we have today. When I first started actually selling cakes and cupcakes under cottage food law, my goal now, we were very.
We were. I'm grateful because I stayed home with my kids their whole childhood. I was able to be there and experience them in a way that I'm very fortunate for.
And I've worked my whole life. I have always worked. So for me to stay home, it was difficult grappling with the person who I used to be and the person that I felt like I needed to be personally for my kids.
So when I started selling cakes and cupcakes, my goal was to contribute to the house. We didn't need it. Tim, you know, he made a very good living, and he provided for us in every way that, you know, we had all of our needs and we had lots of wants, too. But I just wanted to contribute financially. I wanted to be.
I just wanted to contribute financially.
And I said to Tim, I'm like, you know what? I'm going to sell enough cakes and cupcakes so that the profit will cover the cost of a nice vacation for us.
And he's like, go get it. Like, green light, like, go get it.
And eventually, I mean, I've certainly started selling cakes and cupcakes, and I started earning a lot of money from it, and eventually it bloomed into the academy, and now it's, you know, it's half of our income. Like, More than like, it's. And it's a dream that's growing that Tim and I talk about retiring with. And it's evolved into something that I never imagined that it would or could.
[00:28:54] Speaker A: So I love that. And there's more to explore there. I want to take a step back. So flower piping, to whatever level you want to go into it, where did it come from? Like, where, like, how did it develop?
And like, kind of where was, where was its beginnings and where is it today? Is it like currently? Is it a lost art or is it still as popular as it ever used to be?
[00:29:18] Speaker B: No. So there's two different kinds of flower piping? Well, I'm going to say there's three different kinds of flower piping. There's very standard flower piping that you see here in America. It's usually on cupcakes.
They're very kind of rudimentary looking flowers. They're nice. You kind of go, you know, they kind of make you turn your head a little bit.
And then there's Korean flower piping, which kind of originated over in Asia. It's a little bit more intricate and involves what's called Korean buttercream, which is a very, very lightly sweet buttercream. It's very, very buttery, but it pipes beautiful petals. And the flowers, they look very real.
They look like flowers, but there's. They're not necessarily modeled after a particular flower. So there's petals, there's projection, there's dimension, there's, you know, everything that makes a flower beautiful is there. But you're like, what kind of flower is that?
[00:30:24] Speaker A: It.
[00:30:24] Speaker B: I don't, I don't know what that is. It doesn't resemble anything actually in nature, but it's beautiful.
And then there's the Pipini Academy flowers.
So I, I looked at Korean flowers and I'm like, this is really beautiful, but it can taste better and it can actually be a real flower.
I want to make a flower out of buttercream that tastes good, tastes like sweet. It's got taste and flavor and body and a little bit of salt and, you know, it makes it happy into something that actually looks like it comes from the ground. So if you have someone come to you and say, you know, say someone loses their husband and she's like our wedding flower, or you happen to know their wedding flower was a dahlia or a hydrangea, how sweet is it to go and make her cupcakes or a cake covered in buttercream flowers that actually look like hydrangea to, like, help her, like, show your sentiment and connect with her.
So I set off to make ridiculously real flowers out of buttercream. And for me, what that looks like is I go to the grocery store. I don't go to the florist because I'm cheap, and I get a bouquet of flowers.
I will walk around Wegmans all day just looking at the flowers, and my daughter does it with me. We'll go to this grocery store, and she's like, mama, can we go to the flower section? And I'll say, you know, we can. So we find ourselves over in the flower section, just looking for flowers. And all one will catch my eye, and I'll bring it home, and I won't necessarily know what it is. I'll look it up, you know, because I'm. I'm not a floral expert.
I'll look it up, and I'll say, okay, this is our next class.
So I'll get my piping bags out. I have my buttercream, my nail, my block, everything I need.
And I look at it, and I try to pipe it petal by petal, getting every petal almost as exactly as I see it with my eyes. So to me, it's almost like painting a picture.
And that's step one. That's my creative process. That's the process that I enjoy the most, because I can be a free spirit. I can do whatever I want. I can mess up as many times as I want. I can. There's no judgment. There's no pressure. But at the end of that process, once I have it, I'm like, okay, now I have to standardize it. Now I have to turn it into a process that can be replicated by someone else.
So that's when I come in and I make my outline, and I define each petal.
And I have very specific definitions for layers of petals. Like, I have the inner outer center, lower petals, and through that same framework for every single buttercream flower class, I teach people how to pipe these realistic flowers.
And it needs to be the same framework, the same scaffolding, the same systematic way of learning it every single time. Because the last thing I want is to change things up constantly throughout every flower piping tutorial. Because as that person is trying to learn the differences, they're also trying to familiarize themselves with the format. Oh, the backgrounds change, the, you know, the names of the flower, body parts have changed, or there are no names. They're trying to familiarize themselves with the process, and that's expending mental energy I want them to expend all of their mental energy on the things that actually are changing, which is maybe the way the petal lays, or if it's more closed or opened, or if you need to do things a little differently than, you know, the last flower you learned.
So, yeah, I mean, that's really how it came about.
[00:34:25] Speaker A: And is it a common thing in North America? Are there people out doing that commonly, or is it kind of like a little bit of a lost art? Or is it viewed as being like, oh, you just get that from a bakery. You get it more from people who are trained in it.
[00:34:35] Speaker B: There are certain types of people, certain types of people who generally wouldn't pay much, you know, for a cake they, you know, they'll go to. You can get them at Walmart. You know, everybody has seen the grocery cake, the grocery store cake, flowers, the grocery store, hot pinks and blues. And, you know, there are people where it doesn't necessarily matter to them what the cake looks like. It's fine. And I'm that person at Christmas, to be honest. You should see our Christmas cakes, because I. We host. We host Christmas, and I'm usually so tied down with the sweet potatoes and the turkey and everything else. I'm usually like, screw it. I'll bake the layers and then I'll plop the buttercream on and set the top on. And I'm like, it's good, Tim. Serve it. That's perfect.
But, you know, there are other types of people or other occasions where you want something that looks more like art than like something you eat. And because of that, because there are people out there will continue to be people out there. Weddings, you know, 90th birthday parties, graduation. People generally want nicer cakes. So there is a high demand for these types of things. Now, would you want it every Friday? Probably not. But does it add something special to your occasion? Absolutely. And right now, over here in America, the types of buttercream flowers you can find are just kind of the standard buttercream flowers. Like, they will look nicer than what you see in a grocery store, but they won't blow the sleeves off your shirt. You know, they're beautiful and they probably taste good, but they're, you know, I.
They are art, but they are not art.
So what I'm trying to do is bring art into food more so than what we have now. So it's not. We're working on it. The more members we can bring into the academy, the more this thing is going to spread. And, you know, When I cottage baked in Sparta, I was the only one anywhere close to selling flowers, making flowers, buttercream cakes, buttercream cupcakes with flowers that looked like this.
So everyone was coming to me because the standard of what was out there, whether it be at the grocery store level or the step above, it's like once you see what you can have, it's difficult to go back and get that grocery store cake, you know, for your special occasion.
So I was bringing it to the area I was becoming in Sparta a little famous. Like, I would take my kids out to the playground and people would come up to me and say, are you the pipe peony? It's like, yeah.
We'd be sitting down at dinner and people would say like, you're a Dara. And I'm like, yeah. I was like, tim, did you see that? Like, I'm kind of a celebrity now. And he hated that. He hated that. But yeah, so we are. I'm trying to create more of an existence of buttercream realistic buttercream flowers in America because there is a huge market for it. A lot of people don't know it exists, but once you see it, you cannot unsee it. And then you can never go back to looking at the standard buttercream flowers the same. They just don't look the same.
[00:38:00] Speaker A: So we have this friend named Pat who, he does hand painted signs.
He's in the, in the Bay Area.
And my friend Ross, shout out to Ross was like, oh, you need to have Pat on the, on the podcast. What he does is super cool. The story's really neat. And when we met with Pat, he was talking about, he's like, well, listen man, like there used to only be hand painted signs. And actually before the common, before literacy was really common, it wasn't even hand painted signs that had letters. It would just be an image so that people could see what you're saying store was about.
And you know, then neon signs and all that kind of stuff, vinyl signs, those, those started coming along.
And it, he was like, the reason it matters and why I do hand painted signs. Is it that, that switch to vinyl signs and, and digital signs, all that, it's changed our environment.
He's like, the, the world is a less beautiful and magical place because while you might have like a cheaper like sign that you can get and it's like, you know, it can last forever or whatever, the world is less beautiful. You have something that doesn't have that sense of artistry to it. And if you look at the landscape with Painted signs. And without it, it's a colder, more kind of desperate looking world. It's a, it's a world with less humanity. And that's my mission. It's like, yeah, of course, like the hand painted sign is the, is the product, but really the goal is to kind of like create like a beautiful landscape. To create, create a world that's like magical and whimsical and powerful. A world that like an environment you want to be in and you want to walk down the street and be like, whoa, look at that, or look at that. He's like, I don't know if like people are like looking at like an a frame sign that it had been like, whoa, look at that. But it's part of the whole picture of being a beautiful world.
[00:39:48] Speaker B: I love that.
[00:39:50] Speaker A: Super. Like, it was a really powerful conversation. I was like, yeah, like, I have a lot more appreciation for this. So what got me thinking about this in this conversation is like bringing art into food.
And so from your perspective, why, why is that important? Like, why does that matter to you?
[00:40:11] Speaker B: Bringing art into food to me is there's a utility there and there's also sentiment behind it. So the most important thing for me, the thing that started everything was I can take this, you know, just this normal, average thing, and I can make it beautiful. I can inject art into it and I can give someone a feeling from it. Like, I can, you know, you can look at something and it can literally give you a moment of ooh. Like, like I, I feel that like based on. And what's fascinating with art is really, you know, you can communicate with people through colors. You can really, you know, depending on what colors you pair together, you can affect a mood in people. And to me, that was fascinating.
So why not pair it with something that naturally brings people together anyway, which is food, and just jack it up to a level where not only is there sentiment and there's gathering and there's conversation, but now there's art.
Now I'm talking to the room through colors that I'm using. I'm speaking to the occasion. I'm.
I'm in essence almost becoming a part of, of their special occasion. I mean, one of my favorite things when I was cottage baking was, was doing weddings and doing, you know, monumental life celebrations.
To be a part of these happy times for these people, for to be able to add to it. And to, you know, to me that meant everything to me. Food is love. And to cake wasn't always love to me, but it turned into that. It turned into a beautiful bouquet of edible flowers that are artfully arranged in a color palette that could make you feel something.
And it's given to someone and it makes them feel something, and it connects you to them, and it connects you to the room and to the gathering. And I just found so much utility in it also, too, for, you know, practical purposes, because I am. I'm not a planter.
I don't do well with flowers. I have killed succulents.
So contrary to what I'm making, I actually am not good with plants.
So whenever Tim would, you know, bring me home flowers or we would get flowers or as succulents, I would eventually kill them, and I would feel bad about it. But then there's also the work that comes after it. Now. Now I've got to, you know, throw them away, and they. I've got to wash the vase and, you know, there's strings attached to it. And the thing that fascinated me with buttercream flowers is, like, here's this beautiful flower.
Eat it, eat it. You don't have to throw it away. I mean, you can if, you know, you're counting calories, but it's not going to die. It'll live in your refrigerator for at least seven days. You've got seven days to work with it, you know, And I just found that so fascinating and tying that to just a love of nature.
It's like the natural movement of nature, the stillness of it being out in it. The look of a field of flowers is so peaceful. It's so peaceful and it's so beautiful. And I just took the two, and I figured if you put these together, you have the deliciousness and all the feelings that food, especially celebration food has, coupled with the beauty that comes from nature, the beautiful flowers and the way that they make us feel like, put them together. Put them together and make them into something that really can add to someone's occasion.
[00:44:25] Speaker A: I. I love that so much.
Stay tuned for part two of this interview. Next week on One Step Beyond.
