Hi! I’m Maddie. Welcome to Breakfast Club!
For almost a decade, I worked as a financial planner, consulting with clients on their stock options and company IPOs, 401(k)s and employee benefits. And then—record scratch!—in my late thirties, I started pursuing my love of baking as a profession.
That meant leaving my home in the Pacific Northwest to land in a top-floor flat in Paris, where I’m a student in the Bread Baking & Viennoiseries program at Ferrandi.
It’s a tale as old as time: I grew up making challah, gooey secret-family-recipe brownies, Marian Burros’ plum torte, and jars of homemade hot fudge (the perfect teacher’s gift!) with my mom, Debbie.
When I was little, she started a neighborhood cooking school called “Kids Can Cook Too!” Her apron is my most prized possession, adorned with each student’s name and tiny handprint in colorful puffy paint.
But as tidily as I’ve summarized things here, this career change wasn’t a straightforward stop along a linear path. It was the result of three major losses: my divorce, my mom’s death, and the loss of my financial planning job.
For the first year after these concurrent losses, I wrote about my efforts to befriend life’s profound uncertainty under the newsletter title Your Five-Year Plan, tongue firmly in cheek. After moving through the acute stages of grief, I changed my publication’s name to On the Cusp, which felt right for the next stage of my life, whatever it might hold.
And then—still searching in the wake of these big life transitions—I booked a trip to Scotland and Amsterdam, where I found myself in an unexpected (but passionate) love affair with breakfast pastries.
The rest is history! That’s when this newsletter became Breakfast Club: a celebration of pastries and personal growth in the company of others.
As I navigate my new life in Paris (and, eventually, beyond), you’re invited to hop aboard the rollercoaster with me.
Here’s what you can expect to find on Breakfast Club in the winter and spring of 2025:
🥐 The Baking School Diaries, a series for free subscribers offering a peek behind the scenes of (you guessed it!) baking school.
🇫🇷 A bonus series for paid subscribers called Weekend in Paris—one part recap of my off-duty adventures, one part dishing about (temporary) expat life.
Bienvenue! I’m so glad you’re here.
