Meet Mrs. Natalie Slater. I started stalking her about three years ago via Flickr. I love love love love the fact that she is all tatted up and bakes cupcakes. She is not your mother’s baker. We share a love for all cute things, mini food toys and dollar store/section finds. And lets not forget to mention the sick sneaker collection her husband has. She even has a tattoo of a dunk in his honor. If that’s not love I don’t know what is!

So here is a little about herself in her own words….

I’m a 29-year-old food writer and baker from Chicago, IL. I started out breaking eggs for my mom as a little kid and baking cakes for baby Jesus in my Easy Bake Oven. My interest in writing started almost as early – I was obsessed with S.E. Hinton as a kid and determined to publish my first book at an even earlier age than she did. I was about 2 chapters into a book about a teenage runaway when my mom popped her head into my room one day to tell me she’d read it and it was cool so far. Completely frustrated with my total lack of privacy (although in hindsight, it was just my mom trying to encourage me) I abandoned that effort.

In grade school I wrote a letter to my school principal explaining why the Hobo Lunch on our cafeteria menu was offensive and when she agreed and changed the name I knew I had some power in these little hands of mine. I wrote for my school newspapers in grade school and in high school. I guess my first taste of food writing came in high school where I shared a column with my best friend. We reviewed junk food and TV shows every month – it was heaven. After high school I went to work in an Italian bakery and went to school for magazine journalism. I got frustrated with school and dropped out with one year to go. I spent the next few years touring with my friends’ bands and generally wasting my life away.

In 2006 my son Teno was born and I was working as a nanny. I found myself with time on my hands when the little ones napped and I started to get back into baking. I never saw my friends anymore, so I started Bake and Destroy as a way of keeping them informed about what I was up to in my weird new role as a housewife. Pretty soon I figured out that finishing school and getting a job would be WAY less work than being a stay-at-home mom so I enrolled for my final year at Columbia College. (I could not have done that, by the way had my amazing mother-in-law Jo not uprooted herself and moved to Chicago to watch Teno while I did so – or if not for Tony, the world’s most supportive husband.)

I was shocked to find out that everything I’d learned about writing via my blog was pushing me to the head of my classes. Not to say that I was the world’s greatest writer, but age and experience were on my side and I managed straight A’s in every class. (Tony would like to interject here that although I did RECEIVE straight A’s I spent most night sobbing into my pillows convinced I was failing.) I did a few freelance food writing pieces for Time Out Chicago and Baking and Pastry North America and lucked into a job with ReusableBags.com where I currently handle all of their social networking.

Meanwhile, I am still baking and blogging and getting into trouble whenever the opportunity arises. I just filmed a pilot called Cupcake Wars for Food Network (I was an “expert panelist”) and I still say yes to freelance work whenever it comes my way!

You can catch Natalie here and here

Posted in TL.NYC steeze, that bitch

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