What is your favorite baking memory/memory in the kitchen?
Baking with my grandmother in her kitchen.

When did you start baking? Who taught you, and who inspired you?
My grandmother was a great baker, she taught me how to make sugar cookies, cakes and frostings. She was a constant inspiration in my life.

What were your favorite baked goods growing up?
Cookies, cookies, and more cookies.

Where and when did your career in baking begin?
As an amateur I started baking when I was very young and continued with many days of "experiments" in my parent's kitchen. I went on a little hiatus and started baking a lot my senior year in college and then came full circle once I enrolled in pastry school and started my company Confetti Cakes, Ltd. in 1999.

If you didn't become the cake master you are today, what do you think would you be?
Probably a different type of designer. Perhaps working in textiles, package design, architecture or as a painter.

Who/what has shaped your baking the most over the years?
I love to be inspired by everything around me, including my clients, artists, fashion, and architecture. It all influences the designs of cake.

What influences your baking style?
I don't do fancy cakes, I want the elaborate designs to taste as great as they look. I want our cakes to taste just like a homemade cake. They should be moist and delicious, not full of many different flavors. You can't beat a classic vanilla cake with vanilla frosting.

What is the secret to making each cake taste so delicious?
Finest ingredients, made from scratch, heavily tested recipes.

What's your favorite ingredient?
Valrhona cocoa and pure vanilla extract.

What was the most difficult cake you had to make? Why?
For a wedding last year we had to make a replica of the Victorian house where the couple was married. We not only had to make the cake out of our deliciously moist banana cake with chocolate ganache filling, (during the summer in NYC…think hot, and very humid) but we made the cake exactly to scale and design down to the color of the paint chips from the house. Everything had to match exactly.

What was your worst baking disaster?
It is probably in my future.

Which was the most challenging?
Six-foot tall sock monkey competed during the Food Network's Extreme Cake Challenge. Everything had to be completed in seven hours.

Which is your favorite-flavored cake?
Too hard to say!!! Depends on my mood. Vanilla, almond, banana and chocolate…the list goes on.

What is your best tip for first-time bakers?
Read the recipe ALL THE WAY THROUGH to the end BEFORE you start baking.