Meet Amanda Lasser of Baked on Brighton in Burbank

Today we’d like to introduce you to Amanda Lasser.

Amanda, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
In February of 2017, I heard about a group called Bake America Great that was hosting political bake sales all over Los Angeles to raise money for Planned Parenthood. I didn’t have a lot of baking experience but I wanted to be involved so I asked the organizer of the Burbank bake sale if anyone was making pink pussy cookies. She said no one was, so, perhaps naively, I told her I would make them.

I had no idea how to make them but I knew exactly what I wanted them to look like – a simple pink cat face with white whiskers. And I knew I wanted to make them using “that fancy icing that dries” – though I didn’t even know what it was called. Up until this point, I’d baked cakes using box mixes and I’d decorated cookies and cakes using grocery store icing, but I’d never baked from scratch or made royal icing. I have a friend up in the Seattle area who decorates cookies though, so I asked her how she makes them. My friend told me to look up a royal icing recipe and gave me some tips for working with it. I bought a cat face cookie cutter and other supplies I needed and watched a few hours of cookie decorating videos on YouTube to try and figure out how to do it.

I think I spent about 20 hours making my first batch of cookies. Honestly, most of them ended up in the trash because they were either underbaked or burnt. But by the morning of the bake sale, I had 2 dozen adorable pink pussy cookies that I’d individually wrapped and attached stickers to that said “Bake America Great” or “Grab ’em by the cookie”. Those 2 dozen cookies sold out in 10 minutes and a woman at the bake sale asked if she could commission me to make cookies for the 1 year anniversary of her business. So, from my first batch of cookies, I got my first order.

From there, I experimented with ingredients and recipes, and a lot more cookies ended up in the trash until I figured out a recipe I liked. I continued baking, practicing and taught myself how to pipe flowers and do other advanced decorating techniques. Less than 2 months after I made my first royal icing sugar cookies, I had obtained a cottage food license and started selling cookies out of my home kitchen.

Shortly after, I obtained my business license, I posted some Easter cookie samples in a local Facebook group and that’s when my business really took off. I mostly do custom cookies for birthday parties, showers and other events, but recently, I have also started decorating cakes – all out of my home kitchen. It’s been kind of a whirlwind year and one that I never expected, but I really love decorating and creating beautiful edible art!

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc. – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
It definitely hasn’t been a smooth road. Royal icing cookies take a lot of time to make and a lot can go wrong. The butter can bleed into the icing, if over-mixed, the icing won’t dry properly or can get an excessive amount of air bubbles, some cookie shapes break more easily than others and you can decorate a set of cookies one day only to go to bed and wake up to find that the colors have bled into each other (which isn’t pretty.) My first year of cookie decorating I had a lot of really late nights, sometimes up until 4 or 5 in the morning working on cookies and there were a few times I had to throw entire batches in the trash and start all over.

And, to make it all even more challenging, I started all of this when my youngest daughter was only four months old. So, there was the sleep deprivation of having a baby that still woke up at night, on top of all the nights spent up late baking and decorating.

One of the craziest nights was last August when the Burbank hillside behind our house was on fire. I was making my first two tiered cake, our whole backyard was lit up with an orange glow from the fires and my then, 1o-month-old was up every hour teething. I stayed up until 5 am that night working on the cake and going back and forth between the kitchen and her bedroom to comfort her. The next morning, I had to cover the cake box with plastic before I delivered it because there was so much ash falling from the sky. It was an intense 24 hours.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
I make everything from scratch and I use organic flour, eggs and butter in all my baked goods as well as premium vanilla and vanilla bean paste. I started using organic ingredients because that’s what I use for my family, but I find that they are also higher quality and I think that’s what makes my cookies and cakes taste amazing. I don’t think I’m some genius baker – I just know how to follow a recipe and I use the best ingredients I can find. I’ve found that the premium organic flour I use, makes the cookies softer than conventional flour and the high-quality organic butter I use, gives my buttercream a really delicious flavor.

And, while people often compliment the taste of my cookies and cakes, the thing I love most is decorating. I really take pride in coming up with original designs for my cakes and cookies. I don’t copy other decorator’s work because it’s not interesting to me to replicate. This is art for me. I decorate cookies and cakes because I love creating something original and beautiful, and I also find the decorating process to be a form of mindful meditation.

One of the moments I’m most proud of is when a photo of cookies I made for a baby shower was reposted on Instagram by Wilton Cakes, which is the biggest name in cake and cookie decorating. To have Wilton repost a picture of cookies I made in my first year of cookie decorating was really validating as a cookie artist. Some other highlights from this past year include baking cookies for Betty White’s birthday party and for Cirque du Soliel’s Luzia.

What were you like growing up?
Growing up, I was really shy and I was always attracted to the creative arts. I loved writing, drawing, painting and performing in plays. I didn’t bake a lot as a kid, but somewhere at my parents’ house, there’s a picture of an amazing cake that I decorated with a friend of mine. Well, 12 years old me thought it was amazing. I don’t remember exactly what it was supposed to be – only that it used a ton of food coloring and involved a landscape scene with a field and a river.

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bakedonbrighton/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bakedonbrighton/

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