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SMCP Paola Velez Transcript

She’s My Cherry Pie: Paola Velez Transcript


























Jessie Sheehan:
Hi, peeps. You are listening to She's My Cherry Pie, a baking podcast from The Cherry Bombe Podcast Network. I'm your host, Jessie Sheehan. I'm a baker, recipe developer, and author of three baking books, including my latest, Snackable Bakes. Each Saturday I'm hanging with the sweetest bakers around and taking a deep dive into their signature bakes. 

Today I'm talking with trailblazing baker, Paola Velez. This episode is a little different from our past shows. We talk about a range of things with Paola, including the early days of her career, her most loved baked goods, her upcoming cookbook - congratulations, Paola - and flavor-first philosophy. And of course, we talk about Paola's role in the founding of Bakers Against Racism. Bakers Against Racism was born amidst the civil unrest that happened during the summer of 2020 and was incredibly galvanizing for the baking community. Today, Bakers Against Racism is widely considered to have been the world's largest bake sale and everyone's collective efforts help raise more than 2.5 million dollars for organizations big and small fighting racism. It really showed how when bakers come together, they can truly change the world. At the end of the episode, we have a special treat. It's Paola at the Cherry Bombe Jubilee conference in Manhattan from last year. She reads a beautiful poem by Mary Oliver, The Summer Day. Stay tuned. 

Speaking of Jubilee, I know I'm going to see some of you at this year's conference. For those of you new to Cherry Bombe Jubilee, it's the largest gathering of women in and around the world of food and drink in the U.S. It's taking place Saturday, April 15th at Center415 in Manhattan. Come network, try beautiful food and drink, and hear from some incredible speakers. You can learn more and snag your ticket at cherrybombe.com. Jubilee tickets sell out every year, so don't delay. 

Today's show is presented by Le Creuset and California prunes. Here's a word about Le Creuset. For nearly a century, Le Creuset has been creating joy in the kitchen and beyond as the first in colorful cookware, the finest in quality and design, and the favorite of generations of cooks and bakers. Here, on She's My Cherry Pie, there's a reason I always ask our guests about the tools and equipment they rely on. You can have the best ingredients around and be one of the world's top culinary talents, but you also need cookware and bakeware you can depend on. Professionally, I've relied on Le Creuset for years, when I'm developing recipes, testing new treats for my cookbooks, or making something precise like caramel. And personally, I use my Le Creuset pieces all the time when cooking for myself or my family. If you need a special gift for any upcoming college graduations or weddings, you can't go wrong with a classic Le Creuset dutch oven, which you can use for almost everything. You can make individual molten chocolate cakes or berry crumbles in them or even use them for your mise en place. Head over to lecreuset.com to browse their gorgeous colors, find other gift ideas, and snag some recipes. 

Let's chat with today's guest. Paola, so excited to have you here on She's My Cherry Pie, and to talk bake sales and so much more with you.

Paola Velez:
Amazing. Thank you for having me.

Jessie Sheehan:
Of course. Now, first things first. Wow, you are an amazing and totally inspiring person.

Paola Velez:
Oh, thank you.

Jessie Sheehan:
As well as an award-winning pastry chef, content creator and influencer, co-founder of Bakers Against Racism. So I've read that you fell in love with cooking while sitting in the booth of the restaurant that your mom's cousin owned and watching the kitchen, and that that eventually led you to the Cordon Bleu, but that you did not study pastry there, which I thought was so interesting. Tell me about that.

Paola Velez:
Yeah, so honestly, I did originally want to become a pastry chef from the get-go. I was a little nervous. I will say that. I was a little nervous, so I didn't do the traditional two-year. I actually sped it up to nine months. So I was in school every single day from 6 a.m. until midnight, and then I was able to graduate at an accelerated pace. But when I started out in the industry, I moved back to New York and I started working at places like Le Colonial and I trailed everywhere, Oceana. I tried to get to these places and a lot of the fine dining places were like, “Hey, you are too nice. You can't even look us in the eyes when you talk to us.” And I'm like, “Well, yeah, you're screaming at everybody.” You know what I mean? I was like, “I don't want you to scream at me. So if we don't make eye contact, you can probably pretend I'm not there.”

Jessie Sheehan:
I read somewhere that you were looking maybe for more savory cooking jobs, but people kept commenting on the size of your hands and saying that the small hands indicated that you should be a pastry chef and not a cook.

Paola Velez:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. So at the beginning, way at the beginning, I would apply to jobs and at that point I had enough experience as a grill fry cook, which is not an easy task actually. So I was really excited that I got to this point in my life and then folks would look at me and if they didn't offer me a hostess job, they would then offer me to work either in prep or they would say, you should actually be in pastry because you have small petite hands and those hands are better suited for pastry than they are for frying and grilling and all these things. And I mean, were they right? Maybe. I don't know.

Jessie Sheehan:
I just didn't know there was a hand size component until I heard that.

Paola Velez:
Yeah, they are very small hands.

Jessie Sheehan:
You worked for Jacques Torres. Tell the story of how you just walked in there and got that job because, Paola, you are so fearless and tenacious. It's a great story.

Paola Velez:
I think that going up to Jacques was the perfect lightning in a bottle. I went up there and they had just moved into the giant chocolate factory that they had built in Brooklyn Army terminal. He needed workers, and I was just like, “I can follow directions. If you tell me what to do, I'm never going to fight back.” I'm never going to be like, “No,” because I just want to know why you do certain things the way that you do, and in order for me to learn that, I have to follow through with the whole process, in order for me to understand and then make my own informed decisions. So he was just like, “When can you start?” And I was like, “Whenever you want me to start.” He's like, “Well, I can't offer you as much as you're making right now as a sous chef, but are you okay with that?” And I was like, “What's the schedule like, because I really want to go on dates with my now husband, right? My boyfriend.” But it was the perfect schedule. It was Monday through Friday, nine to five. I was like, I've never, ever heard of a schedule like that in the kitchen. And I was like, sign me up. I don't even care how much this pays. Let's go.

Jessie Sheehan:
Can you describe your dessert style, Paola? You've said it's ‘no frills,’ which I love because I'm anti-frill, but can you unpack that a little?

Paola Velez:
Yeah, so for me, what I do is even if there is molecular gastronomy inside of the dessert, I'm hiding it. That's not the main reason why I make desserts. I don't want to solely show you all the cool things that I can do. I want to teach you what we can do with flavors in our pallets and what we can explore. I know that right now there's a big trend of pairing like outlandish flavors together and just modpodge flavors. And then people are like, “I don't know if this makes sense, but I don't mind that, right?” Because I'm like, “If you don't know if it's going to work, you never know.” And sometimes, I'm a weird person, I love savory, sweet and leaning more on the savory side because of my savory background. I just don't think that the desserts have to have so much frill to it.

If I'm going to make you a tamarind pecan pie, I want you to focus on the tamarind because that's a unique dessert within itself. It's a tamarind pecan pie. But also I think that Americana classics are beautiful within themselves. They have a lot of history, a lot of challenges that folks had to face in America to make these desserts what they are. If you see Cool Whip in a dessert, don't poo poo it. Understand why it had to be put there in the first place. So for me, desserts is always flavor first and then presentation, but also I kind of like whimsical desserts. So yeah, the presentation's always going to be kind of cutesy.

Jessie Sheehan:
Just an aside, I adore Cool Whip, just so you know. So I am not poo-pooing over here. I'm like, “Yes, Cool Whip.” I wanted to just chat briefly about your new cookbook, which is so exciting. It's Dominican sweets. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

Paola Velez:
So it's actually kind of like a mixture of Dominican inspired flavors with Americana cuisine. For me, I personally am trying to find my American identity through food and what does that mean as a child of a Dominican immigrant? So this food is kind of like an homage to New York, all of the melting pot flavors of that city, of the city that I grew up in, that I could take a Metro card train car to a different world, basically. One day I could be in Little Italy the next day I could be in Little Poland. It's kind of like that idea, but also this is a love letter to people who are immigrants, who are children of immigrants, even if there are someone who knows their identity as an American, but still has a difficult time placing themselves in that, this book is that. It's not just for Dominicans, it's not just for Latinos, it's not just for folks of the African diaspora. This is for everyone who needs to figure out what their American way is.

Jessie Sheehan:
When did it come out?

Paola Velez:
If I do everything correctly, next year.

Jessie Sheehan:
I wondered if we could talk about a couple of your bakes before we get into bake sales, and I hope you would tell us about your pecan plantain sticky buns. I know they were inspired by your mom's love of sticky buns and plantains. First, can you tell us about the filling? I know it has plantains and sugar and spices. Is it cooked on the stove top?

Paola Velez:
I stew plantains until they break down, all the fiber breaks down, and then I infuse that with spices, warming spices, a little, a touch of sugar because if you do my recipe correctly, you're utilizing the plantain at its maximum ripeness, right as it's about to turn bad, and that has so much sugar in it already. I think that with the plantain sticky buns, what I did was I reworked why certain things were there. So you put butter in there so that it adds a lot more moisture and a lot more of that softness comes from the butter kind of releasing inside. Then you keep the sugar and the cinnamon and that stays and kind of becomes homogenous with the swirl. So I was like, “What can I do to make that happen naturally with something that is just naturally occurring in nature?” So,  I was looking at all of the starches, all of the things that I could use, and you could do this with even potato, not sweet potato, potatoes. And you could make delicious potato sticky buns.

Honestly, for me it was like half and half. This is food science and this is why I'm doing the things that I'm doing and this is why I'm subbing out and this is why the ratio of this works. And then the other half was my mom was watching Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives with Guy Fieri. She's like, "A mi me encanta Guy Fieri." Which means, I love Guy Fieri. Or if you're really a Spanish speaker, it's like, I really, really like Guy Fieri. But I think she loves Guy Fieri. And man, she loves Guy Fieri and he's teaching her about Philadelphia style sticky buns. What can I do to make that happen for her? And then what's her favorite thing to eat, which is baked sweet plantains with cinnamon and sugar. And then I was like, “Aha,” I know how to break down the plantain enough to make it into a paste that isn't fibrous, that isn't going to be overwhelming or heavy or dense. And I know how to highlight these flavors in the plantain with the brown sugar. And then I know I have grains of paradise folded in there and nutmeg, which is my favorite spice in all of the lands. Nutmeg, if you're listening to this, I love you. Really.

Jessie Sheehan:
Oh my gosh, I love that. Another thing I love about this recipe, I know the dough is just like a simple yeasted dough, but then you have something called pan caramel, which I love. You're cooking everything together prior to baking the sticky buns and you don't bring anything to a particular temperature. And also I love the name. Tell us about pan caramel.

Paola Velez:
Pan caramel is one of those things that kind of came out of a whim. It also came out of a necessity because I wanted to emulate that iconic like toasty undertone that honey buns have in bodegas. But if I did that with the regular, I use a hotel pan in the restaurant, but a regular 9 by 13 pan, I would over bake my baked goods. Typically, most folks do still pour a layer of caramel after they've baked their baked good. But I was like, “What if I let the oven do a lot of that work for me?” Honestly, I personally think that the biggest tool in a baker's toolbox is not their hands, despite what that gentleman said about my small hands in the pastry kitchen. It's actually the oven. We learn how to manipulate temperatures and we learn how to manipulate what we want, what results we want based on the temperature, the time, even the placement in the oven.

Yeah, pan caramel's so easy. You literally combine everything. You melt the butter, you combine everything together. You put all your warming spices inside. You layer it on the bottom of your baking pan and then you place your dough on top. Typically, I like to let it cool down before I put my dough because then it would help over proof the dough. Although this dough is very resilient, I've made it that way for a reason. You put it on and as you bake it, it melts into its actual caramel form because of the protection of the sticky buns. They're moving, they're covering a lot of surface area. Then the pan itself is coming up to that temperature, but also the sticky buns are absorbing all of that caramel unctuousness, right? And you overturn them quickly, very fast. In my opinion, I think that's the most important process of my sticky buns. You have to turn them immediately after you make them in the oven, which is a very scary process for those of you guys at home. But do not fear a little caramel burn will never hurt you for long.

Jessie Sheehan:
I also love, and I've never even heard of this before, that you serve these buns at least in a restaurant, or maybe people even serve them this way when they make them at home, but with frozen cream cheese frosting. How did you ever think of freezing cream cheese frosting?

Paola Velez:
I didn't want to just cover all of that beautiful glossiness and that bake that I just created, although sometimes I do serve it with grains of paradise icing, like a small drizzle or I reinvent the wheel. But for this presentation in a restaurant, I really had to elevate what it was. I wanted to make sure that when you get that presentation you're not just like, “What is this? This is just a pinwheel.” So, I had the idea of taking iconic cream cheese frosting and breaking it down. So what makes cream cheese frosting, cream cheese frosting? Cream cheese, a little bit of powdered sugar, a little bit of butter, and then I kind of manipulated cream to get to that consistency. So when we would churn it, it would taste like you were letting butter melt in your mouth, but still having the fluffiness of Philadelphia style cream cheese ice cream, right?

So that airiness that you would get from cream cheese ice cream. So there was a little bit of corn starch in there. There was a lot of cream. I did actually base it off of a custard based ice cream, which is very like, “Whoa,” you're doing too much because if you're already doing the cream cheese and the corn starch, why are you introducing egg yolks into your base? But I was like, “This has a reason.” I need it to be smooth. I don't want it to clump up and I don't want it to, when I churn it, to form butter.

Jessie Sheehan:
The other dessert I just wanted to mention, your chocolate rum cake.

Paola Velez:
So, that base is based off of the iconic Dominican pound cake recipe that you see in a lot of Dominican cakes. So the Dominican Republic doesn't have a lot of sweets actually, but we do have one thing that we are really stoked about. We really like Dominican cake. It is served even at funerals. We love it. Like we will celebrate, we will mourn with it, we will get married with it, and then sometimes just because it's a Tuesday, we'll have cake. We'll walk to the little pasteleria and we will buy a slice of cake just because we're like, “You know what? This tastes amazing and I want to eat it.” So, that's my base and infuse it with layers of chocolate. There's a little bit of melted chocolate in there to give it the structure. There's a little bit of cocoa powder in there. I might be using noir cocoa powder if I'm going to be using a different style of rum in my soak.

And then I actually use labneh because I think it's delicious and the tanginess kind of offsets a lot of the sweetness of the soak. Traditional rum cake is sold all throughout the West Indies, or anyone who has Caribbean heritage, rum cake, black cake, golden rum cake, and if you go on vacation, you know that in all the gift shops are filled with rum cake. So for me, what I like to do is I like to try and utilize rum in the way that we utilize bourbon and vanilla. I break down what the notes are of the barrel, I'm usually, and typically I'm working with my rep, I'm trying to figure out what would they pair it with in a drink, and then that's how I would infuse my rum into my batters. So, chocolate rum cake comes from a 12-year Appleton rum, which is very expensive.

You have to figure out how to make your food cost worth it. And then I infuse it with subtle spice notes, subtle warming spices. I don't want it to be overwhelming because I do want the chocolate to be the star. The chocolate and the rum are the star of this dish. And then I need it balanced enough so that when you introduce it into the soak, you have enough of that butter to seal your cake, to maintain the moisture, but also you don't want it to be icky and buttery and weird. Allspice is the king of my rum cake with Appleton 12-year. It's like playing on what already Dr. Joy Spence does with her rum making.

Jessie Sheehan:
Let's take a quick break and we'll be right back.

Thank you to California Prunes for sponsoring this episode of She's My Cherry Pie. It's a funny coincidence that California Prunes is our sponsor because I love prunes. Last year my doctor told me I should eat six a day for healthy bones and I've been hooked ever since. Prunes are also good for your heart and your gut, and they're loaded with nutrients like vitamin K, dietary fiber, potassium and antioxidants. And moreover, they're delicious. They're 100% my go-to smart snack. Snacking aside, I didn't realize how versatile California Prunes are for cooking and baking, but it makes perfect sense. They're sweet but complex with a rich jammy flavor that compliments so many ingredients from chocolate to cheese. You can use chopped California Prunes and baked goods like muffins and scones the same way you would any other dried fruit. California Prunes are a lush and healthy addition to any of these treats. You can also make prune pureé, which is prunes and water blended together and swap that into certain recipes in place of eggs or oil or to reduce the amount of sugar. For more on prune pureé and great recipes that include prunes, head over to californiaprunes.org. Now back to our guest.

All right, so now I want to talk about bake sales with you, and before we do so I just wondered if you'd tell us a little bit about Bakers Against Racism's beginnings. I've read that it was the donut popup that you were doing, Latin American donut pop-up that benefited local D.C. undocumented workforce. Was that kind of the impetus?

Paola Velez:
It's a little more complicated than that. For me, I have always been hosting bake sales, but I'm a very private person. The only folks that would know about the bake sales would be the folks buying the baked goods or the local public school systems that I would be baking for. So before the pandemic, I worked with DCPS and some local private charter schools to help them fundraise for soccer uniforms, for food, for things like field trips, and I had all of that taken away all of a sudden. For 2020, I had a bake sale every quarter planned. I was super excited for the DCPS [District of Columbia public schools] community. I think personally, I was very frustrated when the pandemic hit and after a very dehumanizing experience with the unemployment office where they were like, Wwe're not offering you unemployment because you need to work.” And I was like, “How? How am I going to work? How? There's no more jobs.”

We don't even know if tomorrow's promised, but these bills still have to get paid. I realized that I had a lot of privilege in saying that statement. See, my humanity while not even thinking of the undocumented workforce, which makes our industry go forward, which makes things happen. Our busers, our dishwashers, our servers, our cooks, our prep cooks, the whole ecosystem of the culinary industry is based on the shoulders of the undocumented workforce. For me, I was just like, “Oh my God, I am a hundred percent not even aware of the realities that these folks are facing.” So I did this donut pop-up shop in a Latin American food hall, and they were very gracious to me. At the end of the popup, I was faced with the harsh reality of the murder of George Floyd. I always say I'm in D.C., but D.C. is not just D.C., it's Maryland, Virginia, and a lot of different ideologies are surrounding our nation's capital.

I was just thinking we could go down into Virginia. We love to take a trip to Richmond all the time, and my husband and I, we present as black. We are black, right? And imagine a world where I would be with Hector and all of a sudden we get stopped and it escalates to the point of me losing Hector forever. And I was furious. I was frustrated. I couldn't see past my own rage. I was upset with the world because I gave all of myself for a month and a half to do better for the world. I felt so much anger and so much disappointment and just so much, like how could we be in a global pandemic where we are literally losing our lives to something that we cannot even see and we have time to hate each other?

We have time to view somebody and still question their humanity. I was fuming, half because my back was hurting because I was making every donut by hand and half because I was just like, “Why?” I didn't choose to be born this way. I was just born this way and there's nothing in this world that I can do otherwise to not be black. I was so sad because I've thought perhaps for just a moment while we figure this out, while we figure out the pandemic, that we would learn how to care for each other and how to love each other and how to respect each other no matter how different our opinions could be. And then Willa came and was like, “Hey, I saw your pop-ups.”

Jessie Sheehan:
Can you just tell people who Willa is, just in case they don't know?

Paola Velez:
Of course. Willa Pelini, she formerly was a pastry chef of Emily's here in Washington, D.C. She is now working in nonprofit work. She's no longer a pastry chef, but she is always a pastry chef to me. Willa was a pastry chef at the time and she was like, “Hey, let's do one more pop-up. We saw your donut pop-ups and all of D.C. was moved.” And I will say that every single person that was in contact with me in D.C., whether it was them dropping off food to help me eat when I was doing all of this work, spreading the word, people were there and they were paying attention and they were like, okay, how do we organize too? And I responded to Willa and I was like, “Willa, is it enough? Is it enough? Is one more bake sale enough? Will it save my husband's life?”

I was like, “I need some time to think about this. I need some time to process what happened.” She was super apologetic. She was like, “I'm so sorry. I just didn't even think about how this could be impacting you emotionally, mentally, physically.” And I was like ranting. Hector, if he listens to this, he probably will be listening to this, he knows that I just go on rants and he's the only person on planet Earth that I do it to. So then in one of those long-winded rants, I stopped and I was like, “Oh my God, I should ask more people for help.” Willa and I can team up and double our efforts, right? But if more people come and join, then we can do more. So I was like, “Okay, let's gather everything that I learned from these bake sales, from these this pop-up really, right?” Because it wasn't a bake sale, it was a pop-up, right? A donut pop-up shop. Let's put it on Google. So we gathered everything together. We put on what to do.

Step one, this is what I do when I'm about to host a pop-up series. This is what I need to be doing if I'm partnering with a restaurant, this is how to work with their own POS [point of sale] system. This is how to work with Tock, which is a payment website for chefs. I was like, “Okay, so we have the information down,” and this was like Saturday night. Willa messaged me Saturday afternoon. I think I had just finished my last popup that day, and Saturday night I'm doing all this stuff, right? I'm like typing up everything. I'm trying to put everything together. And then I was like, “This needs a title. This needs a name. This needs something that we can all stand underneath the umbrella.” And I was joking and I was like, “What if we called ourselves Bakers Against Racism?” And Hector was like, “That is an aggressive name. I like it.” And I was like, “Okay, great.”

I'm a little less shy about just being honest and I'm a baker against racism. Whatever the racism is, I'm against it. I don't want to see it in the world anymore. But honestly, it's a perfectly acceptable name because we don't want to have hate in this world anymore. We don't want to look at each other and judge each other by the contents of our packaging. We should be judging each other by our soul, our heart, our intentions. I contacted Rob [Rubba]. Rob had been working towards opening Oyster Oyster. Oyster Oyster is now a Michelin Star restaurant. He is best new chef. He is doing God's work in sustainability.

I was like, “Hey, Rob would love a favor from you if you have time to spare.” He was like, “Yes.” And I was like, “Okay, can you make graphics that say Bakers Against Racism?” He's like, “Hell yeah. Yes.” And he's like, “My daughters are Asian and I need to protect them in this world, and I need to make sure that I'm standing up for them and making sure that the world is a better place for them.” So he's like, “Whatever you need, yes.” He actually took donuts from the first popup and integrated that into the first graphics that you saw go live. Then we came with Willa. I was like, “Willa, do you have time to meet on Monday? Rob is here too, and I'm going to ask you for something that is going to be very crazy, but I cannot be the sole founder of this organization.” We are also decentralizing it, and we are not accepting any money. We're not accepting a dollar through us. We're going to be a lighthouse that's going to point people to the organizations that we have vetted and that we think are going to be creating lasting, impactful change in our industry and in the world. And I need you to be co-founders with me.

Jessie Sheehan:
I just want to talk about a few of the ingredients that I think make up the bake sale and then some of the tools for executing that when you're planning your own bake sale. What's amazing is that you guys, on the Bakers Against Racism website, you have this incredible frequently asked question sheet and all of these documents. So any listeners who are interested, it's all written down for you on the site, but can you walk us through some of the tools like the money you might need? How can you secure your funds for the ingredients that people might need for the baked goods or for their venues? How do they pick a charity? Locations? I know you talked again on these sheets about the baked goods, thinking about allergies, just being really sensitive to all of the different pieces that you put together for the bake sale. And then finally just social media. It's like the tool for making all of this happen. But if you could just run us through how those ingredients and then those tools bring us to a bake sale, I would love to hear that.

Paola Velez:
For sure. So first you go onto the website, www.bakersagainstracism.com, and you pull up the FAQ sheet. So now you have to establish yourself, who am I? Am I a home baker? Am I a chef? Am I a business owner? And you navigate through the sheets as you figure out who you are. Am I baking with a group? Can I partner with a local business? I always encourage folks to partner together because safety in numbers. But if you are doing it solo, how can you utilize this bake sale to just talk to your community, even just your neighbors or your family members? That impact is still as big as a global bake sale. So you take all of these documents, all this information, and then you figure out how to set these pars. What do you want to make? What are you really good at?

I wouldn't say making beautiful entremonts is what you should do for this, but if you can, I want you to do that. But pre-sales is what makes this work because through that, you are already collecting these funds, and we always typically try to include a lot of the tax forms too. We make sure folks understand what it means to take money, if you're not just asking people to donate directly to an organization and you're donating your product and your time. At first it used to be donate this amount, which was just what you made from your pars, right? But as the economy changed and as cost of goods and things changed, we became a lot more sensitive and in tune with what needed to change for these bake sales to make these bake sales happen. There could be a larger business like Milk Bar that is donating a hundred percent of the proceeds, or you're just donating 20 or 30% of the proceeds because you still have a business to run and cost of goods.

At the very least, you're covering the costs of the goods that it costs you to make these desserts. I think what really works with all of this is transparency. So this organization has only been around as long as it has been is because we are honest with everything. Even when I wanted to do a large full-blown bake sale, I had to pull back because I realized that I would be leading the organization down the wrong path if I went through with making this first ever bake sale happen in person in real life. And the transparency of it is me just being honest with everyone. So I encourage everybody else to be honest. Being honest when you host these bake sales is probably step one. Being honest with yourself, being honest with what you're going to be doing, who you're going to be donating to, and what you're going to be making. Being honest too is what I keep doing and why the organization keeps growing and why it's fruitful to this day. I'm honest with how I fund the organization through my own jobs and through my own means. I'm honest in the growth, right? I slowed down a lot of what this organization could be at this very point because I need to learn more. I need to grow with the organization, and I need to make sure that the trust that people have in me stays the same.

Jessie Sheehan:
Hearing that makes so much sense. It also seems like when you can use social media in this incredible way, Paola, I still remember, I guess it was via Instagram where I first saw Bakers Against Racism. What's this? Was that always in your head, like the way to make this happen during this pandemic is to do this via social media?

Paola Velez:
I think it's lightning in a bottle, to be honest, right? The algorithms decide what's going to be viral or not. So we don't have a lot of say in that. The hashtag, the messaging, and the mission was honest enough, it was transparent enough that other people were like, “I trust you in order to do this.” And as people gain trust, it's spread throughout the globe. And so many people trusted me to help them just pick an organization to donate to. And if not, just show them how to pick an organization that's helping their community in their own backyards. I think social media is what'll save us, but also what can harm us. But how we utilize social media is truly up to us. But I think, like I said before, transparency is the key in anything that you're doing, even running a business.

Jessie Sheehan:
Thank you so much for chatting with me today, Paola. And I just wanted to say that you are my cherry pie.

Paola Velez:
Aw, thank you. You are my cherry pie.

Jessie Sheehan:
It's Paola at the Cherry Bomb Jubilee conference in Manhattan from last year.

Paola Velez:
Hi, everyone. So, Kerry [Diamond] reached out to me to say something. At first, it was ‘say whatever you like.’ And I said, “Huh, what does that mean?” And then as Kerry and I do, we kind of exchanged back and forth and I said, “Kerry, I can't do this. I'm too nervous, I'm too scared, I'm too this, that.” And I asked her, “What do you actually want me to do?” Just tell me and I'll do it. Anything. So she said, “Can you read a poem and then share a few thoughts?” And I said, “Oh, I could do that. I could share a poem that I don't have to write.” This is Summer Day by Mary Oliver.
Who made the world? Who made the swan and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean. The one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down, who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes? Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open and floats away. I don't know exactly what prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I've been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last and too soon? Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Mary Oliver.

Thank you Kerry, for sharing this beautiful poem with me. The first time I read this poem, I sat in my thoughts and asked, what is my plan for my one wild and precious life? Anxiety washed over me. I am no stranger to anxiety. But as I reread what Mary Oliver kept saying, I let my mind wander through the field of flowers where I let my fingertips gently touch each wild flower appreciating their beautiful yet fragile fragrance. I daydreamed that my imaginary self could finally stop and smell my flowers. And if you're like me, I hope that you stop to smell yours too. Thank you.

Jessie Sheehan:
That's it for today's show. Thank you to Le Creuset and California prunes for sponsoring today's episode. Don't forget to subscribe to She's My Cherry Pie on your favorite podcast platform, and tell your baking buddies about us. She's My Cherry Pie is a production of the Cherry Bombe Podcast Network and is recorded at CityVox Studios in Manhattan. Our producers are Kerry Diamond and Catherine Baker, and our associate producer is Jenna Sadhu. Thank you so much for listening to She's My Cherry Pie, and happy baking.