Check Out Marie Delepiere’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Marie Delepiere.

Hi Marie, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I grew up in a small village in the heart of Provence where the houses walls are as thick as a castle, where it smells deliciously of lavender, where you hear the sounds of cicadas, and devour crunchy almond biscuits bought from the colorful farmers market. On paper, it was a dream childhood.

In reality, as a child, I was very shy and my childhood wasn’t easy for many reasons. My mother was not a good cook, but having given birth to four kids in four years, I can understand that it wasn’t her top priority to spend all her time in the kitchen. So, at the age of 12 years, I started to cook for the whole family and friends. I felt secure and protected in my domain, and I soon discovered that I had a gift, which had been lying dormant all this while.

I spent my childhood dreaming of becoming a great lawyer who would defend the rights of all the children of the world and I embarked on an exciting study of law and criminology. However, my desire for independence got the better of me and I soon found it necessary to support myself financially. I started working in several large French cultural institutions such as the Odéon Théatre and La Maison de la Radio in Paris.

I only found my way back to cooking and baking when I met the man with whom I was going to share a piece of my life and who was a chef at his two family-owned restaurants in Paris.

We collaborated on advancing his existing businesses for many years and developed the proposition of a culinary/wellbeing center in New York, but eventually our roads separated along the way.

I learned a hard and fascinating lesson, and in the process I reconnected with my childhood passion, pastry. I probably would never have become a pastry chef if I hadn’t moved to NY and if Covid hadn’t revolutionized the world. I started baking out my Brooklyn apartment in March 2020 and since I never stopped. I moved in LA two years go and created my own company that is still in development.

All of these life circumstances led me to discover a little more about who I am, to trust myself more, and to become more creative and ambitious than ever.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The road has been really bumpy these past few years. I had to reinvent myself several times since I arrived in the USA four years ago from Paris. I had just settled in New York from working in the hospitality industry when the pandemic struck and destabilized the whole world. One day at the beginning of the lockdown, I was sitting on my couch asking myself a million questions about my future and how I could survive during this crazy situation when I had the idea to create my home bakery in the kitchen of my brownstone in Greenpoint (Brooklyn). I started very simply on Instagram with a post: “One Lemon Tart bought, One baguette gifted”. Step by step, I posted further on social media and my business grew very rapidly. I was working 18-hour days managing several jobs at the same time … teaching French, baking, parenting my son, sourcing ingredients and delivering my products. It was very challenging to find the essential high-quality ingredients during that period. But with a lot of passion, hard work and perseverance, I managed to build a small following in just a few months.

The challenges didn’t stop there. We made the sudden decision to move to Los Angeles to try a new adventure without having any reference to this city except for a few friends. Within a month, I organized the move, we put the bags in our car and hit the road to cross the United States over a three-week road trip, stopping along the way to enjoy the beautiful nature that this country has to offer.

The transition to Los Angeles was harder than I had imagined because it was still in lockdown, and I had a very small network. I moved into my sister’s friend’s apartment in Studio City and started all over again, little by little developing my baked goods via social media, once again working out of my apartment kitchen. In two years, I’ve experienced a lot of ups and downs. I often felt like giving up, but each time an unexpected event would take me by surprise, telling me not to give up.

Today, I still bake out of my kitchen for both private and corporate clients and have invested in some professional equipment such as a dough sheeter. My goal is to find a business partner to set up a large-scale project that is not just centered around my baking but to incorporate a center for well being of the body and mind, and why not also an École de Pâtisserie that does not yet exist in Los Angeles, to teach the art of creating French pastries.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am a French pastry chef who is totally self-taught. I learned everything by myself and developed my art and creativity through passion, motivation and hard work. I had to learn resilience otherwise, I would have given up already. Simplicity and quality are my watchwords. I elaborate recipes with fresh and seasonal products. I bake the classics of French pastry exclusively with French products; butter, flour, high-quality chocolate, vanilla from Madagascar… The selection of my products is of major importance. Building a world with a better taste is a story of intelligence of the heart, of elevation of souls. The objective is to surround myself with people with whom I can share my vision of the world, a living gastronomy anchored in its heritage, its traditions, its history. My philosophy is to care for the body and the mind but also for the planet by respecting the land, the product and the consumer. I consider myself as an entrepreneur committed to healthy and environmentally friendly food to change our way of living, thinking and eating. To create this world with a better flavor, we must be aware of the major issues of our society and put our heart, our courage and a little bit of madness into transmitting our positive and realistic convictions.

Do you have any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
For many French people, fabulous childhood memories are associated with sweet pleasures: Wednesdays spent baking cookies with one’s siblings, birthday parties presided over by a large chocolate gateau, ice cream vacations, or fun fairs with the sweet smell of candy floss…. So many memories that fill us with a joyful nostalgia and that I can now relive with my own child.

A childhood memory that will stay with me forever is the smell of the village boulangerie.

I was 8 or 9 years old when my parents sent me to buy bread and pastries for breakfast at the bakery in my village in Provence. I could smell the scent of warm bread and the butter from the croissants as I approached the shop on the corner.

I loved the crunch of the baguette crust fresh from the oven, to be immediately met with the soft, warm, white interior. I couldn’t resist eating a piece on the way home so that when I arrived back, there was only half of the baguette left.

Another lasting memory of my childhood is when my sister and I would go to my grandmother’s house in the Limousin region of France, and as a welcome gift for us she would always send my sister and I to choose divine pastries from her favorite boulangerie.

We could’ve spent hours staring at the window deliberating upon which pastry to choose. My favorite was “la religieuse au café”, a great classic of French pastries. I ate it slowly with delight, and to this day my taste buds still recall the flavor of the coffee blended with luscious buttercream.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @aimermarie.fr
• Facebook:@mariedelepiere

Image Credits
@ceciledelepiere Photographer and filmmaker.