Pan y Pastel is a mother-daughter team, Jackie specializes in making bread and her daughter, Jennifer, specializes in decorating cakes. Both love to bake, though they bake different products and for different reasons.

Jennifer Hernandez specializes in making beautiful as well as tasty cakes for special occasions such as birthdays, weddings, graduations and anniversaries. She also makes wonderful cookies and other sweet treats. She has always had a reputation among her friends for being a great baker and likes to throw "cookie parties" at Christmas time to encourage her friends to join in the fun. She has always been into some type of craft. Beading necklaces, crochet, knitting, macramé and embroidery are a few crafts that she enjoys doing when she has the spare time. She takes pride in being precise and organized and is a perfectionist about many things. In baking and cake decorating, it leads to a beautiful and consistent product.

Jenny worked her way through college in a bakery and in full-service restaurants as a waitress and a bartender. She was also a manager for a fast food restaurant. Bartending was one of her favorite jobs as she was able to be creative and the hours fit perfectly with her class schedule.

When Jenny was the matron of honor in her close friend's wedding, she and the other bridesmaids decided she would make the cake for the shower. At that time, she had no training as a cake decorator but intended on finding out how to decorate it to look pretty. Her third child was due in a couple months and she wanted to take some cake decorating lessons before the birth. Ben was born in April, and the shower was to be held the following July. The Wilton company offers 3 courses in cake decorating, each lasting 4 weeks, so she took the first 2 simultaneously during her last weeks of pregnancy. It was then she discovered that cake decorating was not only something she enjoyed, but she truly excelled at it! Her "class" cakes looked professional from the start and she began getting requests from friends and family for her very special decorated cakes.

Jenny finished up the 3rd Wilton class in July. This class taught the special techniques for wedding cake decorating such as tiered cakes and working with fondant. Her final cake for this class is shown at left. It was a perfectly executed small wedding cake, covered in rolled fondant and decorated with fondant flowers.

The shower cake, for which she originally decided to take the classes, was also spectacular. It was more like a wedding cake than a shower cake. The bride was known for her love of butterflies and so that was to be the theme of the shower decorations. The 14" square bottom tier of rich chocolate cake was decorated with hand-painted fondant butterflies and was topped by a butterfly-shaped top tier with moulded chocolate details. Everyone was amazed by this cake, both for its spectacular looks, and for its rich, decadent chocolate taste. She received orders from guests at the party for more special occasion cakes.

Jennifer's college degree is in Spanish linguistics. She is also a qualified translator, and takes a special interest in Latino culture. Her husband, Jesús, is also bilingual and they speak Spanish at home. This is how we thought of the name for our bakery. "Pan y Pastel" literally means "Bread and Cake" in Spanish. Jesús is an assistant kitchen manager, trainer and cook for a major restaurant chain. Jesús and Jenny have 3 rambunctious boys who enjoy taste-testing Mama's goodies, and love their peanut butter sandwiches made with Grandma's bread!

Jackie Morris (the Mother) is more of a free-spirit type. She spent 2 decades operating a sewing business out of her home. For most of those years, she designed and made collectible Teddy bears, which she sold world-wide. She received several international awards for her work as a Teddy Bear Artist.

Making homemade bread has always been one of Jackie's hobbies. Her mother taught her to make bread as a child, and it always fascinated her. There is just something magical about putting 4 simple ingredients together (flour, water, yeast, & salt), none of which seem spectacular in themselves, and growing it into a delicious and nutritious product, quite different than any of the ingredients that go into it. It's like planting a seed and watching it grow into a beautiful full grown plant. It seems like a miracle.

During the '90s, Jackie took many trips to Europe, especially Germany, selling her hand-made bears. It was then that she was introduced to, and fell in love with European breads. Her favorites were the German breads, as there is so much variety, and they use many different grains and seeds to enhance their bread. Her favorite was the multi-grain sunflower seed rolls that were almost always served at breakfast. "If only I could make bread this good at home," she thought.

At the time, at least in the part of the country Jackie lived, there was very little in the way of good bread to buy. Commercial American bread lacks taste and texture. Even most bakery bread fell short. The only bread that came close to the quality of European bread, was San Francisco sour dough.

When she got home each time, she would experiment with making German style bread at home. She read somewhere that you needed to create steam in the oven to get good crispy, chewy crust. That she did by throwing ice on the oven floor while the bread baked. It helped, and the bread was good, but it still fell short of the wonderful German bread that she was introduced to on her bear trips. Never to be discouraged, she kept experimenting and studying recipes.

Meanwhile, at about the same time, unbeknownst to Jackie, there were many like-minded people in America trying to develop bread as good as these European breads. When Jackie finally discovered this artisan bread movement, her bread making skills leap frogged! Some of these people even wrote books. People like Peter Reinhart, Nancy Silverton, and Daniel Leader were among the bakers whose books she studied. They taught her much, but free spirited Jackie is not the type to just copy someone else's work! She learned the principals and then started developing her own techniques and recipes. Bread making to Jackie, is a never ending adventure of discovery. For her family, she often just throws together a little of this and a little of that and comes up with something unique that is usually quite wonderful as well. She doesn't need a recipe to do this as she understands the principals of making good bread. For the bakery, she must discipline herself a little to come up with a consistent product that people will recognize and want to buy over and over. It's all still fun to her though. That magic of putting simple ingredients together and growing it into something as spectacular as good bread seems like a miracle to her every time she does it

Mossyrock sourdough bread.