About Beth - There really is a Beth!

My baking career began at age 5, in my backyard. I had my first kitchen set up there, complete with my mother's discarded cake pans and bowls and empty flavoring extract bottles filled with water. I could stay there for hours making fancy desserts out of the various types of mud found in my little corner of the yard. My mother was an excellent baker and we had dessert every night. When I was nine years old, I was finally allowed to bake by myself. I was given the task of making cornbread everyday because my mother loved it so. I also loved to experiment in the kitchen and spent my junior year of high school searching for the perfect chocolate pie recipe. 

At Stanford University in Florence, where I spent a year in college, I learned an even deeper appreciation of food. The Italians have a reverence for food. I traveled around Europe with friends and made both mental and actual pictures of all the exciting new foods I was sampling. The first time I found myself in a patisserie in Paris, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. 

When I returned to Stanford in California, I planned elaborate meals for the enthusiastic group of art and drama students I lived with. When I completed Stanford and was looking for a job, my friend Judy Rodgers, now owner and chef at Zuni Café in San Francisco suggested I take a pecan tarte, one of my specialties, to Mark Miller who had just opened his restaurant The Fourth Street Grill in Berkeley, California. He loved it and decided to order them for the restaurant, even though everything he served was made "in house." I made hundreds of pecan tartes in my very tiny kitchen and when Mark asked if I wanted the job of pastry chef, I happily accepted. My kitchen was getting too crowded!

My next job was at Il Fornaio, U.S.A. Chuck Williams discovered this chain of bakeries in Italy and brought the franchise to the United States. At Il Fornaio, I learned about production, very different from the job of a restaurant pastry chef. I also got to speak Italian again, an added bonus. While at Il Fornaio, I married my husband Rob, a fine artist. When I became pregnant with our first child, Nicholas, I gave up my job at the bakery, because of the long hours and heavy lifting. We moved to Stinson Beach and I started making cakes and pies for local inns, along with wedding cakes…the start for my own business.

We moved to Florence when our son was a year old and we spent a year and a half there, my husband working with Nathan Oliviera at Stanford in Florence and I eating my way through Italy.

When we returned to the U.S. we had our second child, Sophia. I was ready to go back to work as a pastry chef but realized the cost of child care in addition to the long hours, I decided to do my own thing. Again I started with the pecan tarte. I took samples around before Christmas of 1988 to corporations to give as corporate gifts. I sold about 500 tarts and I was back in business.  

In 1989, I started making pies, cakes and pastries for restaurants and deli's in the San Francisco Bay Area at a commercial kitchen. In 1990, when one of my customers asked if I could make cookies, Beth's Heavenly Little Cookies were born. The Beth's Babies cookies are packaged in tubes with my kids dressed as angels on the package and Beth's Babies are packaged in fun brown bags, decorated with a cherub motif. The cookies are bite-sized and made of natural ingredients.

Now, I am making my pecan tarte, the one that started it all, and launching a new line of premium all-natural cake mixes and "The Mix." Beth's Baking Basics debuted February 1998 in three classic cake flavors - Harvest lemon,  Blue Ribbon Chocolate and Heirloom Spice Cake Mix.