Profile

Coming up with crazy recipes is the core. It’s super fun. I also do workshops, magazine work and spokesperson work.

For the Yummyfun Kooking shows I do the writing. I come up with the ideas for the cast. I work on the animation. I host the show.

I also do the hustling – getting the things into the world. I have to sell my books and DVDs. If people aren’t buying my things and enjoying my things, it’s hard to keep doing them. It’s challenging. It’s not my favorite part of what I do but it’s necessary. Doing things like going on the Today Show to make sushi cupcakes are a little nerve wracking but they’re important.

I have an office in my home and the cooking show’s set is in the garage. My office is a total mess. I have a wall of cookbooks and art books, including a lot of jello books for inspiration. I have the shipping center for mailing my DVDs. I have a big computer and lots of sketch pads and notebooks filled with cookie and cupcake designs. It’s the office of a crazy person.

I have a four-year-old daughter and it’s important for me to be near her. I can take a break and play. And I need the kitchen. It suits me to be home.

I’m working with a graphic designer, Andy Goldman. I work with a musician who does the show’s music, John Gold.

I work with magazine editor’s a lot. I’m doing work for Cookie magazine and Rachel Ray’s magazine.

Today, I worked on some recipes. I also worked on another bakery project that I do with my friends called Treat Street. It’s a surprise bakery that we do in the neighborhood.

I also did a cupcake recipe for a clothing company who wants to use it on their mailers. It’s kind of a random job.

I was talking to people about doing a workshop for the Hello Kitty birthday party in LA.

I worked on recipes for the kids’ subscription Kooking club that I’m doing where kids will join the club and get a monthly recipe in the mail.

And I ordered measuring spoons.

Creativity. Self motivation. Faith in what I’m doing.

I try to keep everything during the day while my daughter is in school. I sometimes work late at night after she has gone to bed. I fit work around my family.

I kind of work all the time but it doesn’t feel like working.

Yes. I often go to New York. All of the magazines and television shows are in New York. I sometimes travel to other places for events. Recently I did a zoo benefit in New Orleans.

I love that I finally figured out how to do what I love to do and have it be my job. It’s what I would do anyway. It used to be my recreation. I feel really lucky.

Marketing. But the result is satisfying.

The candy isle at the 7-11. Japanese markets. Postage stamps. Insects. Frosting.

Willie Wonka. I got married on Halloween and walked down the isle to Willie Wonka’s song Pure Imagination.

My mother used to say, “Only boring people get bored.” Her advice to always find something interesting really sunk in deep. I’m never bored.

My Dad’s advice was “There aren’t any bad decisions. There are only other decisions to make.” I have a hard time making decision and sometimes get frozen. He took away the importance of the outcome of the decisions and got me to make moves. Just keep moving and don’t get hung up.

I had a terrible job and a guy who worked there told me, “You are way to nice and it’s never going to serve you. You are never going to get anywhere being that nice.” I cried in his office. It killed me to think that I couldn’t be a nice person and also have an OK career. He was so wrong.

An artist is a rare breed and in a tricky spot to think about a job or career because what you should do isn’t obvious. You are not going to be following a paved path but that should not deter you. You should really, really feed what you love even if it doesn’t make any sense. If there’s not a job in your town that will let you do what you makes you happy, take the steps to figure out what a job could be for yourself and try to breathe into it. Try to make it happen for yourself. It will be up to you to try to create your workspace and your market and audience.

Don’t give up on it. You probably won’t be satisfied in your work life until you are really doing what you need to be doing. Don’t get too specific about what you think it needs to look like. There will be steps you take that will help feed your fire and teach you how to do the ultimate thing.

Be open and don’t give up on it. Even if you have to get a dumb job that doesn’t really suit you, still feed what you really want to do and you can make it happen.

You can really do things yourself. You can make a book and a kids cooking show. You can be creative about how to get your thing in the world and it can happen. Easily.

My first reaction was to say absolutely not because everything was a step that I need to take to get where I am now. Looking back, all of it was important.

But I wish I’d been more patient with myself to not get as frustrated. For example, I wanted to do the kids cooking show a long time ago and I got pretty sad that I couldn’t find a way to do it at the time. I felt like a flop a little bit.

Looking back I can see that I needed to write the cookbooks and get the experience in those years in order to do a better job with the show.

I wish I’d been more patient and not as hard on myself.

I didn’t realize how hard it was to have a newborn. My cupcake book came out right before my daughter came out and it was fortunate that I had something in the world while I was sleepless and trying to be a good mom.

I didn’t have to rush back to work.

I found it very challenging at the beginning to figure out how I was going to balance it all. I certainly didn’t know how to work and raise my daughter. I realized it was important to me do what I had been doing and to do new things.

My daughter was two when I started working on the cooking show. It was the biggest thing I’d ever done -- doing a show without a studio. It was amazing that earlier in my daughter’s life I had the thought I’d never be able to do anything again and that I’d never have the time and space to create.

Being a mom is challenging and takes a lot. It forced me to be creative about how I was going to still be creative and be a mom. You have to use your noggin for sure.

I have always been that kid who played with her food. I tortured my family with Jello desserts as a child and grew into the person who brought the crazy cakes to people’s birthday parties and had really silly theme parties in college.

I suppressed that obsession when I started working after graduate school as a music video and commercial producer. I also had other jobs that were not quite right. At some point during the not quite right jobs I realized that I really wanted to play with my food.

I had to figure out how to do a job doing what I love – playing with my food.

I originally got a degree in communications and painting. The painting felt more right than communications but communications seemed more marketable as a major. It helped me because it taught me about media and how those worlds work but the painting was what really driving me at that time.

I remember going to one of my main painting teachers when I was about to graduate. He asked me what I was going to do next. He told me to be abstract. And I thank him to this day for pushing me in an unorthodox way. He asked me, “What do you really want.” My gut reaction said, “I want my paintings to move.” It wasn’t a normal next step answer. He said, “Maybe you want to be an animator.” That touched a button in me and I responded, “Yea, that sounds great.” It sounded like a great course for me.

I was not ready to go work at an obvious place for someone with a communications degree like a TV station or magazine.

I applied to graduate school and got into California Institute of the Arts that has an awesome animation program. I went there for three years and got a masters in experimental animation. That was perfect. I am so glad that I made that choice.

Of course when I graduated with my masters, I was a working animator, which was not quite what I was supposed to be doing because it is a tedious, crazy job. I wasn’t quite patient enough.

Then, I started working as a music video producer. I worked with my friends and I made good money but it wasn’t a creative position. As a producer, I was in charge of the money, organizing everything and getting the video completed. I didn’t have a creative role like the director, art director, and costume designer. It taught me how to get things done on a small budget.

I felt like I topped out. I was running a fantastic production company and I was well paid. It was great but I realized that my creative muscles were starting to atrophy.

I always kept the crazy foodstuff on the side. I had gallery shows of crocheted food. I self published a cookbook. I tried to keep that part of myself up and happy but it was way in the back seat. At one point, I decided that I had to try and make it my job even if I fall on my bottom and it’s a total bust. I realized that I could always do something else if I failed.

I just quit. People thought I was crazy because I had a fantastic job. I didn’t really have a plan but I’d saved money because I knew I wanted to make the move. My dream was to do a kids cooking show not knowing that it’s kind of a hard thing to do.

I did a super clunky Web site that was really popular. I did versions of my recipes as cartoons like a Jello aquarium cartoon and a sushi cake cartoon. I just did it myself and I got a lot of hits. It got me my first book deal. It seemed like a fun thing to do.

My first book is “Secret Life of Food.” I was really lucky that the publisher trusted what I wanted to do. I didn’t want it to look like a cookbook. I didn’t want the food to be photographed in a kitchen or on a plate. I wanted the weird creations, for example a caterpillar cake, to be photographed on the asphalt of a street instead of on a platter. I wanted the creations to look like they existed in the world if you had a magical eye or were lucky enough to see them someday.

The first book led to my second book, “Hey, There Cupcake.”

Then, I did the Yummyfun Kooking show. I primarily did it myself with help from my friends. My husband is a production designer and so we built the set in our garage and shot it ourselves. It was very liberating.

From where I am now, I realize that all of those steps were important. I do a lot of the animation on my Web site. I do the illustrations for my cookbooks. I’m glad I did the books first. It sharpened my skills at recipe writing. It all led up to the Yummyfun Kooking series, which was my original dream.

I love to play with my food.

The biggest challenge is to keep believing in what you’re doing. You can get in the space where the mountain feels too big. But you’re the one making the mountain.

Having self motivation and the energy to conquer the new thing or finish the new project can be a challenge. I’m not always feeling that confident. But I have to because no one else will finish my things.

You have to have faith that your crazy idea is going to find a place in the world.