Coffee and Sweet Treats

Alice's coffee cup

As I recently started to reflect back to my coffee experiences I realized pretty quick that coffee and sweet treats is my passion.  You hear throughout your life you need to find your passions, what is it that you like, love.  You should work at a job that you don't feel like you are working but rather doing what you love. Those wise words given by others are so easy to hear but to figure out its a journey.

When I was little I remember my family drinking coffee.  I remember the smell of coffee being inviting to me.  A smell that I knew the day had started and it was time to go forth into whatever you had to do. I had two grandmothers that drank coffee.  I remember my grandmother Alice would take out a metal can with a red label and a black lid, put two dollops of coffee grounds into her cup, add piping hot water that she boiled on the stove and then she would drink it black. I remember thinking 'how can she do that?'  My grandmother, Rosario would drink it with milk and sugar. She would sit at the table with her spoon and show me how to stir the spoon in the cup without even knowing that was what you were doing. ( I would be drinking chocolate milk, pretending it was my own cup of coffee)  She would say, in her lovely Spanish accent  "You put the spoon in the cup ever so quietly and then put the spoon in the middle to the bottom, stirring in a rotation without letting the spoon ever touch the cup." On the side she would have a plate with her sweet bread or danish.  As a teenager I would watch my parents drink coffee from the coffee maker. They would add milk or creamer and sugar. Filling their reusable cups with coffee and then head out the door quickly to start their day on the long road to work. This is when I first started drinking coffee. I would drink the left over coffee in the coffee pot after my parents would leave.  I would put an abundance amount of sugar and creamer and more sugar and then wondered was there any coffee in my sugar and creamer.  Nope just the unnecessary amount of sugar.

When I was nineteen, the summer after I graduated high school, I went to Germany to visit an aunt. It was there I had my first cappuccino.  That is when I was introduced to what I call a real cup of coffee.  All these years later I can still remember how good that cappuccino was.  In a little cafe, in the evening, at a little table with soft lights around with other people sitting around drinking their coffees and eating their sweet treats.  I found a new love for coffee.  

In my twenties I went to work in a restaurant that had an Italian espresso maker. The first time I saw the copper top with a brass eagle sitting on top, I knew I wanted to work in this place and make coffee from that machine, not any old coffee maker but that machine.  I went on to work there for a few years.  I also learned a lot of my baking skills here from the owner and a fellow coworker.  Instead of going to school to learn about baking, I would just just sit there in the kitchen next to them asking questions and following their lead. They were experienced and I wanted to be like them. I had the opportunity to do this twice in my career of baking.  I worked at an orchard and quickly put myself in the position of sitting in the kitchen watching what the bakers were doing in which they quickly put me to work making the sweet treats, because they could have always used another pair of hands kneading the dough or sprinkling the cinnamon and sugar on to the tops of the sweet treats they were making.

Many years have passed since those first experiences of coffee and my passion lead me to learning so much about coffee. I know that I have yet to learn so much more. When I moved to California in 2014 and I had no idea where I was going or what I was doing I had a friend ask me "what are you going to do?" I told her  "I am going to go to Starbucks and get a job."  

I just didn't go into a Starbucks brick and mortar store I went to the Target down the street less then a mile from my new home.  I worked there part time doing much of the same thing I have done with all of my jobs, embrace myself into the middle of knowing and learning everything there is to know about what I was doing.  Making coffee was fun. Meeting new people was fun too.  I am a people person and I love the connections I make with people.  I took the knowledge I had of coffee and made something out of it. After eighteen months I was given an opportunity to open a new Starbucks coffee shop.  One inside of a new Target, a flex format store.  It was hard but exciting to see something grow from the ground up.  Putting in hours of building a team, putting things in place and doing it all with a smile and encouragement to others that it was going to be worth it.  It was a fun and a wonderful addition to this chapter of my life. Starbucks is not my favorite coffee but its a business I have learned a lot about.  Things like: how to start a business,  how to grow a business, where does that business come from, where has the coffee been, what it took for that particular plant to get to you to become a cup of hot or cold coffee.

I have met some really amazing people along this coffee journey that started oh so many years ago. I have met people who have taught me so much along the way. My coffee passion has lead me to places I didn't even know I was going.  From sitting at my grandmothers kitchen tables, running out the door in the hustle of the morning, sitting in a cafe in Europe, making a good cup of coffee in a restaurant, learning to bake some really good sweet treats, learning to grow and run a business and sitting in new cafes all around the Bay Area taking in the experience of what my place will look like.  I have told many people for a long time that my goal is to open my own coffee shop with sweet treats.  My own place to call my own. I am in a place in my life where I can sit and reflect on those ambitions, goals, dreams, passions and turn it into my reality.

All the while through my passions I have been a wife to my best friend, a mother to my two beautiful children, a daughter, a granddaughter, a sister, a sister in law, a daughter in law, a niece, a cousin, an aunt and a friend.

I tell others including my children that you have to start somewhere,  you can't just start at the top. Taking your passion and turning it into your life. You have to gain experience and one day you will look back and say "Hey, look what I did!"