I grew up with the belief that combining career with passion has always been the true and tested model for finding joy and purpose in life. Because of that, I found that the most rewarding aspect of being involved in the cooking industry is to do what I truly love for a living. When I was growing up, my mother would always experiment with all kinds of dishes in our kitchen. I remember one time when we were young, and had just moved into a new place, we were craving a specific type of round buns. We couldn’t find a bakery around, and we didn’t really know the area well enough to venture out and explore. So, instead of just letting it go or saying we’ll try again in the morning, my mother concocted a way of baking the bun at home, using a recipe of her own imagination and a microwave. To this day, I’m not exactly sure how she did it, but I remember the smell of fresh bread wafting through the kitchen and the excitement and surprise of getting to eat a meal I’d been craving that I had no idea could even be prepared at home.
My entire childhood was filled with all types of pastries: Pizzas with types of stuffed crusts that were not even yet available on fast food menus, an entire table of cakes for every birthday, and a new recipe almost every day. I’m 100% convinced that some form of magic was flowing in our kitchen. Some of it must’ve ended up in me one way or another, because food became my favorite art form and the one thing I wanted to invest the majority of my time and efforts into.
I graduated from a Language Arts Faculty, majoring in Italian and English studies. When I first started my professional career, I worked as a secretary in a major firm. While I was there, I realized that if I didn’t try to go after what I really wanted now, I will spend the rest of my life wondering what could have been, and I was not willing to do that. I took on a job as a Chef Assistant, but after 7 months, I’d learned everything there was to learn in the position, and decided it was time to pursue my own thing. In Ramadan of 2014, I founded Molly Bakes; a baking startup that specialized in all kinds of pastries, with a focus on cakes, tarts and cheesecakes – a tribute to my sweet childhood (pun intended). The startup has gone through its ups and downs but we have kept it afloat for the past 4 years and we’re still going strong.
Towards the end of 2017, I decided to adapt a vegetarian lifestyle because I noticed that my health was suffering incredibly from a lack of balance in my diet. And, because it has always been my approach in life, I didn’t want to waste time in a state I wasn’t satisfied with, and so a change was in order. This particular change led to discovering a lot of online vegan and vegetarian communities, and discovered a distinct lack of variety in types of cuisine and flavor palettes. The Egyptian cuisine has a different palette to offer, with a zesty, piquant and strong taste that is usually not associated with vegetarian meals.
