Patchwork Underground

When I say this crafter is yummy I think you’ll understand what I mean.  Feast your eyes on one of the many goodies available at Le Beckery, Becky’s new Etsy shop:

Hungry yet?

Well, good news: all of the handmade goodies at Le Beckery are made with as many organic and fair trade ingredients as possible.  Becky hopes to expand soon into an all-organic selection of treats with some vegan options, too.  As it stands now, her intriguing edibles include such rarities as Breakfast Dessert (yes, please!) and palm-sized, wheat and dairy-free Lembas.  Everything in her shop seems to be swimming in some combination of chocolate, peanut butter or coconut.

Trying really hard not to lick my screen right now.  Let’s have Becky take over from here.

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Describe your biz for us.

I’m a baker. I’m primarily working on fancier cookies, but I look forward to adding breads and candy.

When and how did you decided to pursue your craft as a business?

I decided to actually go through with pursuing this as a business in February after entertaining the idea for a couple of months. I wanted to make a profession by crafting something and baking is what I do best. It also is a pretty emotional endeavor for me, I’ve created the recipes over the years with certain people in mind and making them recreates the feelings I have about those people and the time that the recipe came about.

How did you come up with your business name?

I’m not quite sure. It struck me one night when I came back from my other job at a group home. The girls looooove to play with the name Becky and that dirty Pyles song (“Gimme that Beck-ay”) has had them running with lately. I guess hearing my name had it running in my head along with “bakery” and it hit! The “le” part was put in place mainly because someone else had already had the brilliant idea of “the beckery”…unfortunately, they’re not a seller. I didn’t want to confuse people, so I appropriated the French article and made the actual operation consistent with my etsy name.

What does your “average” work day look like?

I wake up at about 8 if I don’t have to substitute teach. I have a glass of water and get going on baking or decorating. By 1 pm I’m ready to ship what I’ve worked on. I take a break and on some days at 3pm I work at a group home for teenage girls. I get back at about 11pm and start working on orders again (while watching hilariously tacky horror films and listening to the click click of my boyfriend writing scripts for his cartoon show). I’m up until about 2 and usually finish the orders in the morning.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned so far in starting your own crafty business?

1. Postage kicks you in the ass.

2. People are more receptive than you might think.

3. The condensation on the chocolate after you take it out of the fridge makes things difficult, especially for someone as impatient as I am.

4. The very biggest lesson, though, is having realized a dream (even if only temporarily). Who’d have thought it’d come true?!

What inspires you most?

Laughter, people…since most of my recipes are reminiscent of good times and people I love, I guess those would be my biggest inspiration. Nothing makes me feel closer to people than laughter.

Also, nature. I feel most free when I’m outdoors and someplace wild. Believe it or not, it actually really influences my taste and decorative leanings when it comes to baking.

What’s your favorite tool, technique or project?

My favorite project pertaining to Le Beckery is creating different butter or bettercream (dairy free buttercream) frostings. My favorite tool is a good spatula with a defined edge. It makes things sooooo much easier and neater!

What’s your earliest crafty memory?

I have nightmares about my days as a girl scout….gluing felt to more felt while I heard about the boy scouts doing ropes courses etc. Eventually, though, I was in a troop that did interesting crafts …I have a horrendous Easter Bunny door hanging made of a straw hat that was incredibly fun to make and, while it’s scary, it’s pretty cool. We also baked occasionally. My first baking memory, though is sitting with my back against a pea green refrigerator licking the chocolate off of a spatula my mom gave me as a reward for “good stirring”. I was maybe two years old and remember being so excited, but also very aware of how much chocolate I was getting on myself without being able to do anything about it!

What the biggest challenge (if any) you’ve had to overcome in pursuing your craft?

The biggest challenge has been figuring out how best to ship these babies.

It’s also been believing that people believe in me. I was really moved when so many people I knew from the near and distant past became fans of my facebook page and reached out to help me promote this. It really means a lot.

If you had time, what new medium/technique/project would you want to tackle?

I would love to make my own clothes! I have a few very talented friends with fashion projects and businesses and I envy being versatile with that medium. Right now, I think I would settle for learning how to alter my pants correctly.

Thanks for the interview, Becky! You can visit Becky and Le Beckery here.

First…

The Story ———

(psst…scroll to the bottom of the post if you just want the recipe!!!)

So, no, I’m not officially vegan…yet…but things seem to be tending towards that direction. I’ve been a vegetarian for ages, so the meat thing isn’t a barrier. But giving up cheese?! I couldn’t imagine it until recently.

See, it all started with oat milk, which I discovered I like better than milk milk. Then, I started getting real serious about nutritional yeast and olive oil instead of butter….on everything! It is so-o-o yummy. (FYI- My most recent discovery in that field is that nutritional yeast and olive oil makes a totally amazing substitute for parmesan cheese on pasta.) Next, when I stopped buying dairy stuff at the grocery store I noticed a major drop in our total grocery costs - cheese and yogurt and butter are way expensive and it really adds up! Beans are cheeeap! The relative difficulty we have with consistent refrigeration on our housebus is also a major incentive to give up perishable (dairy) foods.

Enter Cookies ——–

(Disclaimer: this is NOT an actual image of my cookies…I ate mine before I thought about blogging them, dammit…)

Anyway, vegan baking was a mystery to me until last night when my friend, David, suggested making vegan cookies. We busted out the oatmeal and loosely followed the recipie on the back of the box for cookies, substituting palm oil for butter, bananas for eggs and a molasses/agave combo instead of sugar. I added a little extra water to get the right consistency. David put chocolate chips in his batch but I left mine plain. All was good until we went to turn on the oven. TOTALLY BROKEN!

Enter Woodstove ——–

David opts to bake his 4 at a time in the toaster oven. I decide to take mine over to the huge woodstove they have in their house. It was all fired up and putting out a ton of heat. I’d never baked on a woodstove before so I learned a few things the hard way:

1. You can’t just put the baking sheet on the top of the woodstove. It will burn cookies something awful. (This was obviously my first instinct - a bad one.)

2. You gotta prop cookie sheet up on something - stones, bricks, cast iron pans - to get it up and away from direct contact with the woodstove.

3. Tin foil over the top is a must.

4. The side closest to the chimney pipe is going to be getting the most heat. You may want to rotate the pan halfway through your baking session to get a more even heat distribution.

5. Don’t underestimate the power of a serious woodstove fire. THEY WILL COOK, and FAST. (Don’t be like me and wait for someone to ask if something is burning…)

In the end, David’s toaster oven cookies turned out perfect. I burned the living crap out of half of mine but there were about 4-5 that survived. They were AWESOME! I feel that I definitely won the prize for most hippie-dip baked good ever.

The Recipe ———–

Basic Vegan Oatmeal Cookies

In a bowl, mix:

• 2 sticks vegetable shortening
• 1/4 cup sugar something (we used a half-and-half mixture of agave and molasses…the standard recipe calls for 1.5 cups brown sugar, which I thought that was way extreme. There was a household debate: some people thought my 1/4 cup mixture was prefect, some people wanted more sweetness…you decide)
• tsp. vanilla
• and
• 1 bannana (instead of 2 eggs)

Beat all this together with a fork. Then add:

• 2 cups oatmeal
• 1.5 cups flour (we used quinoa flour)
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 cup water
• cinnamon and nutmeg to taste

Mix that all together. Mix in chocolate chips if you’re David. Mix in raisins or cranberries or walnuts if you’re me and you have access to them. Smear veggie shortening all over your pan and plop the cookies on there. Bake at 350 degrees until it’s done. On a wood stove, this took about 15-20 mins (1/2 an hour if you include the trial-and-error period) and I think it would be 15-20 mins in a conventional oven, too. Enjoy!