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SubscribeWe caught up with the brilliant and insightful Lupita Chavez a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Lupita, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
My curiosity for learning how to decorate cookies with royal icing started when I was a teenager. Once as I was flipping through a magazine I saw some beautiful Christmas cookies decorated with colorful icings. However they were part of the festive table display and sadly the recipe was not in the magazine.
Growing up in Mexico these kinds of cookies were not part of the cookie repertoire. The ones we had were more similar to the cut out cookies glazed with a thin powdered sugar glaze, but that was it..
When we moved to Texas 20 years ago, I started getting some catalogues in the mail and some of them even had the cookies decorated with icing that I fell in love with growing up. They were advertising the cookie cutters and again the recipe of how to make those cookies were not to be found. So I thought there must be a recipe book that has the recipe for this icing, so I went to several libraries, but I did not have any luck. Back in the day, we did not have the convenience of googling a recipe or asking an Alexa device to dictate us a certain recipe.
Then one day we visited a Williams Sonoma store and asked if they taught a cookie decorating class like the ones in their catalogues. They said No, but asked if I wanted the recipe for the cookies and the icing. Of course I said YES! I was so happy and I could not believe that after so many years looking for the recipe I finally found it.
So when I got home I instantly started practicing the recipe. It actually took me a while to finally nail the right consistency even when following the recipe step by step. So I decided to formulate my own recipe.
Later on I found some other good books that teach the beautiful art of cookie decorating. I found that it is a tradition that started back in Europe in the middle ages, so I think cookie decorating is not a recent trend, and it is here to stay!
As for being a content creator, I really did not know anything about filming, lighting, or editing videos. This is something that just came up when I started filming videos with my phone and experimenting with several editing apps. Learning something new is so much easier now that there is so many helpful technologies we can use and there is a tutorial for almost everything. Yet I think that experimenting and not being afraid to show that you are a beginner is very important. I really like rewatching my first videos on the channel because I was not super comfortable being in front of the camera, but it helps to see how I have improved over time.
This also applies to cookie decorating, the more you practice the better you will become, and the more mistakes you make the more you will learn. I am really grateful for having the opportunity to share my baking and cooking experiences with everyone through my videos and soon with in-person classes. Cookie decorating brings me so much joy and is helping me open new doors of opportunities for me.
There is no doubt that if I had attended pastry school I would have accelerated my learning process. My degree in Food Biochemistry Engineering is very different than being an actual Chef or Pastry Chef. I learned so much about the bio- chemical aspect of food and food technology but certainly not fine pastries.
Around 2013 I found out the existence of Facebook groups that connected me to conventions for cookie decorators. I was surprised that there were so many people that shared the same interests as I do within this culinary art. In the Facebook groups they all shared their experiences making cookies. They would talk about what is trending in cookie designs, techniques to use, and the tools that were available. This served as a kind of cookie decorator network.
Attending CookieCon conventions or sugar art shows is something that I have not gotten the chance to do. In these kinds of events you can learn so much and also meet people that have the same interests so that you can learn from each other. I had the chance to be a sponsor for CookieCon for several years and I hope to soon attend one of the conventions.
When you learn something on your own it really becomes a huge investment and this applies to creating content as well. If I had the chance to enroll in a filming/editing video course it would have saved me a lot of time and plenty of headaches.
One positive thing about the way we have being living for the last two years is that there are so many great courses online. At the start of the pandemic there were even some that became free of charge, so I took several courses and I really enjoyed learning from experts in the fields that I am interested in. I want to continue studying to be better prepared to continue inspiring the bakers of tomorrow. So much has change in food trends and costumers demands that we need to be flexible and adapt to those changes.
What skills are more essentials?
Patience, creativity and originality. I will say that these skills are necessary if you want to be successful.
Patience, because while you are learning there will be so many times that you will mess up and need to start all over again. You also need to have patience with costumers and always be polite. Often many sales are via text or social media so you need to have a lot of patience to finalize a sale.
Creativity, you never know what your costumers are looking for. They sometimes come up with great ideas and need the cookies ASAP so you don’t have the time to order the specific cookie cutter you need. That is why you need to get creative with the tools you have handy and come up with your own designs that will satisfy your clients.
Originality, some of the cookie designs I made like more than 10 years ago are still very popular on my Etsy shop! I try not to pay too much attention to what other cookie designers are doing. I just make what I think is cute and emphasizes a lot on the flavor and quality of my cookies.
Again, this also goes for content creation, the only thing I would add is that you need to be consistent. Creating content is something that takes a lot of time until you actually get to reap the benefits. Bringing original and creative content in a constant manner and with patience you will eventually see results!
Obstacles, time, money and lack of organization have been the obstacles that have prevented me to learn more. My family is my first priority and for so many years I only had a few hours to dedicate to my cookie business. So to actually enroll to a pastry or culinary school was to commit to it full time, which was virtually impossible for me at the time. Not to mention it is also very pricey since our priority as a family is to support our daughter in her career. But now that she graduated from college and is on her own, I would like to continue learning more to have more to offer as soon I will be teaching in person baking classes here in Houston/The Woodlands through Cocusocial and at Udemy online classes.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers?
My name Maria Guadalupe, but you can call me Lupita. I do several things but all of them are COOKIE related! I started baking at a very young age, so I had the chance to learn a lot from my mom who is herself an amazing cook. Later on I went to college and received a degree in Food Biochemistry Engineering. This has helped me develop new recipes, create new cookie decorating techniques, products, and introduce different ingredients into my cookies as well as the ability to create novel designs.
I mainly sell delicious lovingly hand decorate cookies for all your special events, you can contact me through my Etsy shop or you can send me a message on my Facebook page as well. I share all my journey and recipes on my website and on YouTube, where I post creative ideas for cookie decorators as well as basic techniques for all who want to get started with the art of cookie decorating. I really cater to all levels of experience because I myself had to start from scratch from starting my home based business to starting a channel.
Recently I became an online Instructor at Udemy where I have two courses, one is a summer cookie decorating class that is perfect if you want to have fun learning basic cookie decorating techniques, for this course no experience is necessary.
The other course is the Christmas Cookie Decorating, in this course you will learn how to cut and bake the perfect cookie, how to prepare different royal icing consistencies and several cookie decorating techniques that will help you to start decorating cookies like a pro. All that you will learn here can be apply to make cookies for any occasion not just for Christmas.
Recently I became a Chef instructor on Cocusocial where I will be teaching in person pastry specific courses to anyone who is interested in learning.
CocuSocial is a marketplace for cooking classes connecting food lovers with local chefs and restaurants or hotels. Their mission is to educate, entertain and connect people through interactive and fun culinary experiences and I am so happy to be part of their instructor’s team here in Houston.
I would say that what sets me apart is that my cookies, besides being pretty, they are uniquely delicious. Despite them having a unique flavor profile I never hesitate in sharing all my recipes, secrets, and experiences so as to encourage others to have fun and let their creativity grow within this decorating art.
More concretely, having 5 stars on Etsy is a great accomplishment for me, offering excellent costumer service is the core of my cookie business. I am also very proud and ecstatic that my channel is growing more and more every day. Despite all the changes the world has been through, people still like to learn something new and I am glad that my videos have helped people start their own home base businesses or start decorating cookies as a way to have an extra income.
Have you ever had to pivot?
I started selling cookies on Etsy in 2010, I was making the cookies in a commercial kitchen, so I was able to ship cookies to any state here in the United States. But soon after we needed to relocate and move to Texas because my husband was starting a new job. I looked for a commercial kitchen to work in, but all the choices were so expensive and at that time The Texas Cottage Food Law was not implemented. I had to stop making cookies for sometime but at the same time a friend of mine introduced me to blogging and suggested I start a cookie decorating blog. So in 2013, I started Mil Grageas a cookie decorating blog in Spanish. I did not know much about blogging, but it gave me the opportunity to continue decorating cookies and share my knowledge and experiences. I then decided to change the name of the blog to The Cookie Couture and started posting in English as most of my readers were here in the US.
Having a blog actually helped me start my channel. When you are going to make a video you need to have a method to structure a video, and I applied the same way I was structuring my blogs post to my videos and it helped me become more organized and to pay attention to details that need to be emphasized in a video.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
I love Pinterest! This is the social media platform where I have the most engagement. I started on Pinterest several years ago, but I have only just recently become more active on it. I had like 400 followers for more than 5 years, but in the last two years my followers have increased a lot ( 3K ) and I have had times that my monthly views have reached up to 750,000 monthly views.
I am very proud of one idea pin which is about how to make royal icing, it is getting close to one million views. I really like making idea pins and that is a way that has helped me grow my audience. I really like how Pinterest encourages you to continue inspiring others. When we meet certain milestones on a Pin they congratulate you and display that same numbers as the number of people you have inspired. This is so awesome for me!
If you are new on Pinterest try to create a business account so that this way you can have access to creating idea pins. Idea pins get a lot of traffic on Pinterest and you can link the ideas to your website or channel and is an inexpensive way to advertise your work.
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Michael Perea
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