People ask me this question more than almost any other: how did your bakery grow so fast? For a long time I didn't have a good answer. Now I do, and it's a bit of a twist. It didn't grow fast. It grew over nine years. The bakery just wasn't open for most of them. In the final episode of my podcast series The Long Proof, I told the story of where my customers actually came from. Very few found me cold on the internet. Most of them had known me for years before I ever iced a cookie for money....

July 2022. I had just moved into my first commercial kitchen, the one I'd bought before I was sure I was ready, and it was finally real. Walls, equipment, and a lease with my name on it. I also had a brand-new problem: a commercial space doesn't pay for itself sitting half used, and every square foot was a number I'd committed to whether or not the orders showed up. Then one phone call, which had nothing to do with baking, nearly took the whole thing apart. The Part Nobody Puts in the...

For a long time, my baking year ran on memory and adrenaline. I'd remember, sometime in September, that Halloween was coming — and scramble. I'd guess how much of each icing color to mix and either run short mid-order or throw out a bowl of green I never used. I'd hit December having no real idea whether the year had actually been good, or just busy. Busy and good feel identical when you're not tracking anything. That was the problem. The thing that changed it wasn't working harder. It was...