Hi, whoever you are! It’s very nice to meet you. How are you doing? Talk about this weather, am I right? Would you like a snack? I have cookies, some hummus, and…shoot, I don’t have any virtual food. Oh, well.

I can see that you and I are going to become good friends, so here are a few basics about me.

1. My name is Sulaf (That’s Sue-laugh, if you were wondering), aka Coco, aka the baker behind this company and site.

2. I am not a boy. I know this seems obvious to some, but to others, like an old man in a Red Lobster and multiple people in Paris, it is not.

3. I was born in 2008, but please do not refer to me as a “2000’s baby”. Though technically I am a 2000’s baby, I take no pride in being born in an era of concealer as lipstick, head-to-toe denim, and frosted lip gloss. I’ve seen photos of them all, and they keep me up at night.

4. I live in New York, the best city in the entire world. You may try to defend your home if you do not live here, but give up. You know it’s true.

5. I always and forever, so help me God, will use copious amounts of garlic whenever I cook. My father is Egyptian and my mother is Syrian, so even if I didn’t like garlic (Gasp! The horror), what choice do I have?

6. Finally, the matcha Kit Kats are just as good as the chocolate ones. Fight me.

   Okay, so you’ve got the gist of my character. I wish you could tell me the gist of yours, but there are no comments, so alas, I will just have to guess. Here we go: You are a comedy writer living in New York City who likes cake and has met George Micheal (And you are not ashamed to admit that you have his signature framed on your wall). No? Okay. You are a runway model who has Celiac’s and has a true crime obsession. Still no. You are a thirteen-year-old who turned thirty because of some magical wishing dust on the roof of the dollhouse built by your one true love, Mark Ruffalo? Ugh, I give up. But if I can’t guess who you are, then maybe I can tell you a bit more about who I am, and more specifically, about my baking journey.

My first baking adventures were when I was two, a tiny little nugget of a person who probably had a very loose idea of what an oven was. My parents were the Lewis and Clark to my Sacagawea, and so I remember my early years being full of beginner-friendly cakes, and one Turkish dessert that ended up in the trash. I have not seen many photos of me at that time baking, but I can imagine me running around the kitchen, feeling incredibly grown up when I helped my mom or dad mix together eggs and sugar, and putting my face in the flour at least once, because I was two and that’s what happens. I was baking, creating, experimenting, and I was loving it.

Then came the dry spell.

I honestly don’t know why I stopped baking for that long. My guess is that as I got older, I made new friends and developed new interests, so those things just took up the time that used to be used for baking. Sometimes I regret stopping for that long, because I could have used that time to develop my skills, learn new things, become a better baker. But every time that thought wanders into my head, I just sigh and feel grateful that the dry spell didn’t last forever.

What really put an end to said dry spell was when one day, when I was ten years old, I watched a little movie called Julie and Julia. If you’ve never seen it, it’s a true story about Julie Powell, a home cook and an aspiring writer, and her journey to cook through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, while writing a blog about her experience. It’s a great movie, but that is not what made me start baking again. It just was the thing that inspired my great idea: A baking blog.

For this blog, I took a pretty big page out of Julie Powell’s book. Like her, I would bake through a cookbook, regularly making recipes from that cookbook in the order in which they were printed, and writing a blog about my experience baking each dessert. This would combine my two of my great loves: Baking and writing. Plus, it would give my parents the wonderful responsibility of having to deal with the leftover sweets that would certainly take over our fridge, so absolutely nothing would go wrong! With that attitude lifting me to clouds far higher than cloud nine, I made a website! I dubbed the whole thing My Bakes Have British Accents because I was baking through a cookbook called The Great British Bake-off: Big Book of Baking, which my parents had purchased a bit on a whim since we all love The Great British Bake-off, and I thought if my bakes were anthropomorphic, they’d have British accents. I am very ashamed that this made sense to ten-year-old me. My baking rocket, full of flour and sugar and butter and eggs, had hereby risen to the stars. T-minus five, four, three, two, one…

Sadly, this rocket did not make it to the moon. After life getting in the way of new posts a myriad of times, my ten-year-old self kind of forgot about the whole thing. The site is still live, but it is no longer being updated, and I would rather the world just forget it ever existed.

It’s easy for me to go back to My Bakes Have British Accents and immediately focus on everything that was wrong with it (How dry the writing was, my endless lists masquerading as sentences), but when I am in the mood to be a self-help Yoda figure, I remember that even though that blog was not my best work, it was just the previews to the feature film that is Coco’s Cookies.

I’m done turning back time, of shaming myself for what once was or what could have been. Because if I keep doing that, for the rest of my life or even the rest of the week, I’ll forget to set the timer on my chocolate chip cookies, and those things are too good to burn.

Yeesh, I was talking for a while! I need to catch my breath. I hope I didn’t take up too much of your time. I would feel terrible if I was the reason you didn’t have time to order sweets from Coco’s Cookies. Also, the karma for interfering with purchases of delicious desserts is usually pretty terrible.

It was nice talking to you, old friend. Catch you on the flip side.

Love,

Coco