What's This?

Beyond the Box started as a way for me to keep myself busy during a brief period of unemployment. Growing up, my mother was always baking and cooking up delicious things, and some of my earliest memories involve her giving guiding instruction as I stood on a kitchen chair and helped make cookies. She would make bread and rolls and biscuits and cookies and cakes and pies, and I grew up thinking of baking as a given. Eventually I came to realize that a lot of people think of baking as an almost mystical art form, next to impossible, and even more so when from scratch!

I have always enjoyed writing, but often struggled with finding writing topics. One day, scrolling through Pinterest, I saw a pin about how to "make a box cake taste homemade!" and it said things like "replace the oil with butter and double the amount and add two more eggs and a teaspoon of vanilla" and I thought to myself, "Hell, if you're going to that much work, just make the cake from scratch!" Combine that with the looks of astonishment I saw when people learned something was made from scratch, I concluded that people simply must not know that baking just requires following directions. This was something I could easily write about! With that, I fired up the old internet and set to work baking, photographing, and writing.

I love to try new things, so if there is a recipe, method, or technique you'd like to see me feature, let me know!

Happy Baking!