My very first food memory was when I was three or four. It was a warm day, and my mom had just picked me and my sister up from school, buckled us into the back of her dusty blue Ford Taurus. She was halfway out of the school parking lot when she pulled over to the side. She strangely reached for her purse that was resting on the dashboard, started fishing around for something until she found it. Then she twisted around to us, and she tore open a yellow paper bag of slightly melted Sugar Babies.
(Audience murmurs)
She poured a few of the pellets into each of our tiny hands. Now, I want to be clear, this was not a normal mom thing. This was breaking several rules. It was after lunch but before dinner, we were in the car,
(Laughs)
we hadn't done anything spectacular to be celebrated. And Sugar Babies are, well, pure sugar. I was so confused. But I was a kid, so I took the candy, and I started chewing. God, I felt like I had just been inducted into the coolest club possible. The one that eats candy on a random Wednesday.
(Laughs)
And then the world, it slowed down. Everything faded. And then everything sharpened. There is only one word for what I felt in that moment. Magic. Real magic.
Now, most people think that’s kind of crazy, three or four years old. I don't remember anything about my childhood for years after that, but I remember that day, I remember those Sugar Babies, and I remember that feeling.
Now, most people think of magic as a trick, right? Abracadabra. This seemingly impossible act, put on purely for entertainment. But I'd like to challenge that. Magic, real magic is not an illusion. Real magic is the feeling when life transforms from the ordinary into the extraordinary. And not only is it real. It is the very thing that connects us to this world, to one another, to our entire existence.
It's the spark of a moment. It's the feeling of believing, of belonging, of getting, of being gotten. It is the crack that opens up our hearts and reminds us to let light in.
Now I own Milk Bar, this quirky American-style bakery that I'll tell you a little bit about later. And I have found that magic is often created by breaking some sort of rule. Like the "no sweets before dinner" rule. Or wearing overalls to a corporate board meeting. Or simply daring to defy the expectations of the people around us. Now, as a kid, breaking the rules usually only got us in trouble, right? But as adults, it's a different story. Breaking the rules, pushing boundaries, challenging the norm, asking why, why not? It does something to us. It shakes us from sleepwalking. And it makes space for magic to sneak in.
Now I was raised by matriarchs, fierce heroic grandmas who loved to bake in their free time. And they knew good and well that food was for nutrition and sustenance, but they didn't care.
(Laughs)
They'd baked as their way of breaking the rules. They'd make batches of lemon bars instead of casseroles or one-pot wonders. And they put those baked goods in baggies and hand them out, hand that magic out to the most unassuming people. The newcomer to the neighborhood, the mail carrier or my personal favorite, the receptionist at the dentist office.
(Laughs)
Now I knew what the receiving end of magic felt like from that Sugar Baby moment. But witnessing what the giving part of real magic did ... It moved these people. It was awe-inspiring. And so I decided that baking would be my way of making magic in the world, creating a moment and then giving it away. A magic pyramid scheme, basically, that I wanted, needed more of.
Only my mom and my grandmas thought that baking was just a hobby. But I knew it could be more than that. So I moved to New York City to become a professional pastry chef. I went to culinary school; I climbed the ladder of fancy restaurants, making fancy desserts to become the very best of the best. Only ... I never found magic in those beautiful, delicate plated desserts. I could only find my magic in a cookie or a slice of cake or a gooey underbaked pie. And so when I opened Milk Bar, that bakery that I was telling you about, I decided I wasn't going to frost the sides of a cake like the textbooks taught me.
(Laughter)
I decided I was going to load cookie dough with marshmallows or pretzels and potato chips and butterscotch chips and coffee, tossing convention out the window. I wanted people to eat birthday cake, not just on their birthday, but any day they wanted.
I knew that my magic came in the form of these simple baked goods, but I also knew that simple, approachable, accessible, nostalgic flavors were my best jumping-off place to create new desserts. Almost as though fancy were the enemy of delicious. I’d go to county fairs to nosh. I'd go to the diner and order slices of pie from that revolving display case. I'd take french fries and dip them in chocolate milkshake and dream. And then I'd go into the kitchen and tie on my apron and start mixing up a new creation rooted in something known and safe and loved but reaching far beyond what anyone thought accessible. Or approachable. Or doable.
Breaking the banking rules became my daily ritual. I mean, who says a layer cake can't taste like salty malty sweet pretzels? I mean, my culinary instructors for one.
(Laughs)
"Watch me," I'd think. And I'd take pretzels, toast them in the oven to deepen their flavor, then grind them into a powder-like consistency and substitute some of the cake flour in a recipe for that pretzel powder. It's pretty good.
When I was opening Milk Bar, I knew I wanted to serve ice cream. A rebellious kind of ice cream. No surprise, right? So I decided to buy a soft serve machine, which for the record, was very rebellious at the time. I had to decide what flavor to make. I mean, why do we only accept chocolate and vanilla as ice cream flavors? I needed to come up with something better, different. Push that boundary. I knew I had to come up with a flavor of milk that was different. Milk is, like, the base of any great ice cream. So I sat out inspiration at my 24-hour bodega. Favorite place to go. Because that's where we all shop, that's where our simple taste buds are formed, it's the flavors we know. Up and down the aisles till I hit it. My favorite section of the grocery store as a kid, the cereal aisle. Now as a kid, my mom and I had an agreement. I was a pretty picky eater, and we agreed that I could have as much cereal as I wanted as long as I drank all the calcium-rich milk at the bottom of the bowl. I mean, I thought it was highway robbery. Does she not understand how good that sugary sweet milk was at the bottom? That's interesting. That's a really delicious flavor of milk. It moved me. It made sense to me, but would it make sense to other people? Figured I'd give it a try. So I went back to the kitchen and made the equivalent of a giant bowl of cereal. I strained out all that delicious milk, and I spun it into ice cream. Put it on the menu. And I've got to tell you, even now, people stop me on the street to tell me about their cereal-milk ice cream moment. "So good." "Seemingly a little naughty." I mean, how did I know that was their flavor? That's the flavor they eat when they're wearing pajamas, when no one's looking. The flavor of their childhood. These people will tell me about every detail of the day. They will tell me about the weather, the company they kept, the way that an ordinary moment was transformed into something magical with a simple bite.
I built my business with the same "challenge the norm" mentality. Rather than measure my business's success by the profit or loss sheet, by the average order value, the other metrics that businesses use to know if they're doing well, I decided we'd measure our impact by the twinkle in people's eyes. By the "Oh, I can't put that down" feeling that they had when they ate one of our desserts. I chose to put women at the helm of my organization. Because when I looked around the hospitality industry, people running operations, folks holding CEO titles, they were all men. I mean, why? I was raised by these fierce matriarchs who handled business, and I wanted my organization to look like that. I want to show the world what women were capable of and what a "bakery" could be. Push back on that cute little box people like to put us in.
And in turn, the rules broke for us. The magic, our magic, got out. Word spread without us spending a dollar on marketing. Rare in our industry, we grew our business without diluting the business. I mean, we won awards no tiny East Village bakery has any business winning.
(Laughs)
It's pretty incredible. Even today I get to witness that feeling, that same one that my grandmas conjured up in my childhood. We ship cakes all across the country, we keep our doors open from early in the morning until late at night. It's insane for a bakery to do. But we do it because we're obsessed with it. We're obsessed with what we do. We teach classes, we share recipes despite any concerns of copycats or intellectual property infringements, because that's what you do when you benefit from what came before you and you plan on passing it along long after you. Thank you.
(Applause)
When you know you're here to give, not take, and leave this place better than you found it. See, mom, you can bake for a living. Pretty cool, if you ask me.
Now I don't have the full equation cracked, but I do know that it starts with the decision to act. My mom, she could have driven that car home routinely, but she decided that that day would not be like the others. She threw out that rule book for just a second. I carry this lesson with me, that every day has within it hundreds, thousands of opportunities to create real magic. Only, they disappear. Unless you reach out and grab them.
Thank you.
(Applause)
