Priscilla Kelly—Pastry Is Her Life

"Making pastry is like creating fine sculpture," is how 33-year-old Priscilla Kelly describes her passion. It is a passion that started long before she ever went to culinary school.

"When I was very young, the family lived in a rural area. My mother and my grandmother got together every week to bake breads and pies. For me, the smell of baking became the smell of love."

Priscilla gets to surround herself with that essence of love every day as the pastry chef for the Border Hotel chain. Her day starts at 4am, when she personally oversees the creation of hundreds of fresh rolls, croissants, and breakfast pastries for the hotel guests. She then takes a well-deserved break at 8am and starts again at 2pm for the dinner preparations.

"Dinner is my favorite shift," she says. "That's when I get to really do what I love. I not only supervise the junior pastry chefs-they're called 'junior chefs,' but some of them are older than I am-but I also get to create specialty pastry desserts and cakes. That's the most fun."

Kelly is modest about her successes, but her specialty pastries have won several regional baking and dessert competitions. The awards began coming to her while she was still a student at one of the local chef schools.

Success from failure

Priscilla's start on the path to pastry perfection started with some spectacular failures in her family kitchen. She had just entered her teenage years when the grandmother and mother baking team decided to pass the generational baton to Priscilla by including her. It was time, they decided, to initiate her into the mysteries of the family baking ritual. The results were almost heartbreaking for the two older women. Priscilla's first attempts at bread came out as solid as rocks. She once doubled the amount of baking powder in a cake recipe "to make it fluffier." The cake rose over the sides of its pan and the future award-winning pastry chef spent hours scraping burnt cake out of the crevices in the oven. Nothing seemed to go right.

"And then one day," she remembers, "I just 'got it.' Suddenly I just understood what they were trying to teach me and everything changed."

One of Priscilla's first successes came at a family Sunday dinner. Her father, Jack Kelly, turned to his wife and mother-in-law and said, "Ladies, this here is the best bread you have ever made yet." There was a moment of silence, and then they told him that his daughter, "Prissy" had baked the bread that day.

Making it official

After that day, it was hard to get the young girl out of the kitchen. There was a constant supply of pies, cookies, cakes and breads in the family pantry. Bake sales and birthdays became Priscilla's favorite occasions. Her reputation grew, first in the family, and then throughout the neighborhood. The culmination came when a flour company held a baking contest with cash prizes. The winners were notified by mail, but a local television news program broke the news before the letters ever arrived.

"Imagine the shock," she recalls, when "mom and I were sitting and watching television and suddenly the announcer was saying that local high school student Priscilla Kelly had won a national baking contest. We both almost went through the roof. I decided right then and there that I wanted to go to culinary school."

Starting over again

The next great joy for Kelly was the kind of training she faced at the culinary school. Her baking technique might have been good enough for family and friends-and even good enough to win a contest, but her teachers demanded a much higher level of perfection. In many ways, her classes were like starting all over again and learning everything from the beginning.

While her family recipes featured ingredients such as "a pinch" of this and "two shakes" of that, Priscilla learned that students at chef schools work with precise measurements.

"I learned that exact temperatures are important for baking, that we had to know the moisture content of the flour and about different methods of applying and transmitting heat."

The course also included subjects such as chemistry, and classes in decoration and presentation techniques. Kelly's teachers emphasized the ability to produce predictable and reproducible results as one of the keys to success. There's no doubt that they put her on the right track. A few months after graduation she began working for a small hotel chain. Now, ten years later, she is the senior pastry chef, in charge of every baked item that is served to guests in any one of the chain's three luxurious hotels.

About the Author

Martin A. David is a writer and translator, specializing in Danish, French and Spanish literary works. He has written numerous feature articles for publications including the Los Angeles Times. He has also published a novel, and a non-fiction book in the area of dance. Martin earned his B.A. in Liberal Arts from Brooklyn College in his native New York. He currently chairs the Santa Clara Cultural Advisory Commission in Santa Clara, California.

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