Hey there & welcome to my digital baking playground 🙂
My name is Ioana and I’m a 31yo. joyful self-taught home baker. Baking for friends and family is one of the things I enjoy the most and it is my way of giving a tiny bit of myself to the ones that I hold dear. Because I believe that enjoying a bite of good delicious food is one of the best and most at hand little daily joys we can offer to ourselves. And to our closest ones for that matter.
I’m originally a Comms and Marketing professional from Romania. But as I moved to my adoptive country (Denmark), I’ve rediscovered my love for food. Not only for eating it this time, but mostly for prepping and cooking it. With a focus on homemade cakes and sourdough bread baking.
How it all started…
For me the baking journey started with a crepe. Or actually… with a crepes stack put together into a cake to be more exact. I had just moved to Copenhagen nearly 5 years ago and my boyfriend’s birthday was just around the corner. But what do you do when you’re in a whole new place, your mom can’t bake and send you the sponge any longer and on top of that, you live in a small studio without an oven… you try to work your way around and use what you have at hand. That’s how I ended up making a chocolate crepe cake with raspberry mascarpone cream for his b-day. And it was a hit among our friends.
As I had more time on my hands, we just started offering homemade cakes as a present for our friends’ birthdays. And I owe to my gang of friends here in Copenhagen to have stepped a bit further with this passion. It was their excitement at first, and then my friends from back home asking about whatever sweet treats I was sharing on social media.
Along the way, as I was taking intensive Danish classes, I also fell for sourdough bread. I basically took on a double-challenge, as I started learning and reading about making sourdough in Danish. Because what better place to get closer to baking, if not Denmark, where the artisan bread baking might be at its peak at the moment.
Sharing baking love
With my interest for bread and pastry increasing, I ended up working in the Front of House team at the best bakery in town (and not only, in my opinion) – Juno the Bakery. So for one year and a half I have been sharing bread and pastry love over the counter at Juno. And even though I have baked less during that period (it’s hard when you have access to such amazing products), I have definitely gained more knowledge form the incredibly talented and passionate bakers at Juno. Nevertheless, that is also when I’ve learnt the importance of good quality produce. So there go some special thanks, and I’ve written more about that in my sourdough bread baking story.
However, with a lot of my friends often asking me about recipes I used when baking, and with most of those being an improvisation, I was usually writing them down in some Google docs that I could share. Then the pandemics took over the world. So out of a sudden the world slowed down for a bit. And so did I. But that gave me time to finally put together this little digital playground. I like to think of it like the digital version of my mom’s recipe notebook. And the way to share with you, my friends, bits and pieces of what I found out along the way. Recipes for homemade cakes and other bakes, some of them inspired by my mom and my childhood. Tips and treats. Plus a little bit of my heart and soul comes along with it.
Happy baking, friends! And don’t forget to share good food and spread love and kindness with it! Cheers!
Contact
For any requests, or if you just want to say hi, you can send me an email at: ioana@withcherryontop.com
