A Baker’s Success Story: Abby McDaniel
A beautiful spead of christmas cookies iced to perfection.
Senior Abby McDaniel takes all honors classes here at Blackman but still manages to bake cookies, cakes, and other things three times a week.
McDaniel started baking about a year ago and now bakes for everyone from her family to school organizations to sport teams. McDaniel began last year with inspirations from her family to the cooking shows she watches.
Her baking inspiration comes from TV shows, Pinterest, and food she tastes while out. Sometimes inspiration even strikes at random times.
“I actually have this bath soap, and I smelled it and thought about how the flavors would go well together [Mango and Pomegranate],” she said explaining how she plans to make a tart out of the two.
Although she bakes a lot of iced cookies, her favorite thing to bake is her peach cobbler.
“It’s a family recipe but it’s also really easy because you just kind of throw everything in a pan,” stated McDaniel, laughing.
Abby makes a lot of great desserts, but she also has experienced some baking fails just like any baker might. But when fails happen you must make quick decisions to handle it.
“I was doing a college reveal for my family and I wanted to make a checkerboard cake and I basically just winged the recipe. It ended up falling apart… So, I decided to make cake pops out of it instead.” She said.
Mcdaniel says her favorite thing of baking is that the product ends up being something she is proud of taste wise and look wise. She also loves when her baked goods make other people happy.
“When they say that dessert looks really good, I’m like, ‘I have succeeded,’” McDaniel. Her least favorite thing is, of course, the cleaning up afterwards. She sometimes is up until 11 pm or later to clean.
She says the dessert that she is the most proud of was for the recipe swap club and it was a pumpkin spice cake with cinnamon brown sugar icing and iced to look like a pumpkin.
She is asked about her baking about every other week either from families of friend or groups. She currently has an order of nine dozen Valentine’s Day cookies to bake.
With an internship and honors level school work, Abby McDaniel still devotes time to her passion of baking.
I’ve had experience with at least 5 different sports but none of them stuck because now I put a lot of time and energy into acting and preforming. Everything...
