My sister and I are dreaming about and planning to open a bakery someday in the not-too-distant (we hope) future. We both love to bake.  We love to spend time together baking (or anything, really)  and think this would be a great gift to ourselves! :) I also love to feed people; I get so happy when I give food to someone and they LOVE it.  My heart soars and I just want to hug ’em.  I almost look forward to that more than I do the actual baking! I can’t speak for my sis (let’s call her Sharon to protect her privacy for now) but I’m pretty sure she’d love meeting and getting to know our customers, too. She’s awesome.

At the moment, we are in the seriously early stage. We’re not even thinking about money or any of that yet.  She has a contract to finish out where she works, and a house in Florida to sell before she could move here to East Texas. That could take a couple of years; I don’t even know. I know that if God has this for us to do, He’ll provide what we need, though we’ll have to work to receive it.  I don’t expect it to all fall from the sky into our laps.

What am I doing to work toward this? I am baking at every opportunity! I’m giving away what I bake to trusted people who, I think, will be honest with me. For example, I gave a treat to a friend yesterday, and his reaction wasn’t his typical “Oh, that’s sooo good!” It was more like, ‘MmmHmmm…what’s in this icing?” (He’ll so deny this. He’s a nice person.) It’s ok! I want to hear all opinions, and I need feedback. Of course, my sons were in love with that icing and there isn’t a lick of it left. 🙂 We all have our food opinions, which is great. I also made Italian butterball cookies, and my boys loved those, as did said friend.

Another recent experiment was a version of lemon bars (pictured above) that I found online, not in one of my cookbooks. It used almost three pounds of lemons! They were so tart and wonderful! I hate a bland, dead-sweet lemon bar. I gave some of these to four or five people, and one guy said they were wonderful,  and just like his mom’s. That was great! It’s a keeper!

My new favorite thing for fall is my twitter friend @sbsbea ‘s iced zucchini bars.  Holy cow, I hope she’ll let me use her recipe in our future bakery! 🙂 Amazing. Very spice-laden, which makes them taste just like Autumn to me.  Find it at: http://my-plate.blogspot.com/  Her blog is great; lots of good recipes, and she is an interesting person, too, which makes it even better.