Bakery Work for Peanuts, Get a Story Setting

I put a temporary ban on peanut butter recipes in my childhood household.

My mother was a contest baker and had worked on a potential winning recipe for a peanut butter-based baked good for the better part of two months. Peanut butter blondies, fluffernutter cookies, peanut butter and jelly cookies, peanut butter bread, and even peanut butter cookies stuffed with peanut butter balls. When Mom finally submitted the recipe to Betty Crocker, I, as the oldest daughter, decreed there would be no more peanut butter for a few months. I couldn't take it.

I broke my own rule with the request of her winning recipe the day it was published in Betty Crocker Magazine that mom was a finalist for her no-bake peanut butter krispie cookies.

Baked goods had always been a staple at my house. Mom, a stay at home mother at the time, usually had oatmeal raisin cookies or apple crisp freshly baked for my sister and I. She made our birthday cakes every year and competed with decorating as a hobby. There was a span of five or six years when she was cooking anything and everything for any and every food contest out there. We got boxes of cereal for her contributions to General Mills. She placed in a recipe competition for Annie Chun and were sent the fixings for several dinners made from their boxed and prepared goods. I still have the several sets of fancy chop sticks they sent. Mom submitted to many a contest and achieved high marks in many; more baked goods than any.

If you were to ask me where my idea for a bakery setting came from, it was my mother. I learned what it took to make a perfect baked good--sometimes even award winning. To me, that's what mattered for a successful bakery. While brainstorming my first manuscript, I didn't concern myself with the business aspect of a bakery so much as the importance of a bakery in a community. I learned early on that neighbors loved being taste testers and wanted to share with their neighbors and so on. Their baked goods brought community and culture to a town. If the sweets were good, the good financials would follow--or, at the very least, a good storyline would follow.

What similarities does the bakery in my first manuscript have to my reality? My favorite treat is lemon meringue cookies and are showcased as such by characters Charlotte and Oliver. The labor of love my mother cultivated in her home kitchen translates into the work ethic of Charlotte and her brother Thomas running Liberty's Bakery.* Through my mother's baking competition budgets, I learned how to be financially literate enough to write about a real bakery's finances.

Writing this first manuscript about saving a bakery was my first foray into writing a serious piece. I wrote what I knew at the time, well before I know how to properly research a project. I wrote the entire thing by the seat of my pants and was often fueled by a sugar high of my mom's latest baked good. But, like the baked good, I held fast to the idea that if I had a good, solid idea for a story, a good first draft would follow.

I've since completely renovated, edited, and re-edited my first manuscript into a polished piece ready for agent queries, but it's a good reminder that you have to start somewhere.

Go call your mom and ask about her favorite recipe.

Katherine Arkady

*Name still under reconsideration for the nth time