Welcome to Breakfast Club! I’m Maddie, an ex-financial planner turned baker. That’s right: I used to create spreadsheets for a living, and now my workdays leave me coated in a thin film of butter.
Whether you’re an accomplished baker, passionate about consuming pastries, or simply in the middle of catapulting your own life in a 180-degree trajectory, welcome! (Also, same.)
Breakfast Club is on a brief hiatus while I complete my baking school internship in Paris. More on that here:
In the meantime, please enjoy this week-by-week recap of my French baking school adventure (complete with daily vlogs), and subscribe so that the next letter arrives fresh to your inbox when it’s fully baked.
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 traded my home in the Pacific Northwest for a tiny flat in Paris. That’s where I started over, professionally speaking, as a student in Ferrandi’s Bread Baking & Viennoiseries program.
My love of baking had been born decades earlier, though, at my mom’s elbow.
Together, she and I made challah, gooey secret-family-recipe brownies, Marian Burros’ plum torte, and jars of homemade hot fudge (the perfect teacher’s gift!). She loved food, kids, and teaching so much that she created a cooking school for the other kids in our neighborhood, too.
But in 2023, in a devastating turn of events, she lost her battle with cancer. And just a few short weeks later, I was laid off from my financial planning job.
Armed with a potent combination of free time and feelings, these losses spurred me to start writing this newsletter. Initially, these regular dispatches helped me befriend life’s profound uncertainty; eventually, they helped me figure out how to reshape my career, too.
After a lot of experimentation and soul-searching, my unexpected lightbulb moment occurred on a trip abroad, where I fell into a passionate love affair with breakfast pastries.
That was the moment I headed down a wildly different career path—a decisive shift I know my mom would’ve cheered for—and changed this newsletter’s name to Breakfast Club: a celebration of pastries and personal growth in the company of others.
Bienvenue! I’m so glad you’re here.
