Welcome. :)

If you are reading this page, you found it from a link on this site or a search about pastry. If you are new to PastrySampler.com, welcome! This site is not a wordpress site. The original site was hand coded by me. Look around! Even though some of the pages haven't been given their new final face lifts, there is some great info dating back to 2004.

My cake decorating background: I did wedding cake couture at the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel for 6 years, and before that was a fine dining restaurant pastry chef. I started this site in 2004 after I gave birth to my second daughter. It has fulfilled both my desire to be in the cake decorating business and be at home with my now three (and now not so little) littles. I love pastry and wanted to find a way to keep in the mix even though I was a full time mom.

Pastry Sampler has now evolved to specialize in cake decorating tips, and I get many, many, MANY requests for custom orders.

Look around. Using the above tabs, you'll find recipes, baking articles, links to the shop, and much more. It started out small, with just a few pastry rings and decorating tools, and grew to a pretty robust site with lots of unique baking tools and equipment for professionals. After a scare with breast cancer, this site has ebbed and flowed but I have many die-hard core customers that have kept me going with their questions even though they didn't realize what a help they were by just connecting during treatment and many surgeries. For that, I'm thankful. And I'm also very blessed to be cancer free now.

Many of the articles you'll find here were spawn from emails or written letters (because way back when people actually wrote with a pen and paper haha) with customers' questions, suggestions, and tips. I figured if one person had a question on a topic, then so did others and I turned those questions into article topics. I'm lucky that this site has been referenced in cookbooks and many pastry blogs. It's the content people want, not the showy plugins from a fancy blog.

My customers are both new and (very) repeat, and over the years have hailed from more than a dozen different countries and all 50 states. I have enjoyed lovingly shipping off pastry tips to the far reaches of the world, and look forward to continuing it in the future.

Thanks for stopping by! Email me if you get the chance and say 'hi.' I use gmail now, lol, as the mailbox size is much larger than my hosting email. pastrysampler @ gmail.com.

This site operates under Beach Cuisine, Inc., of which I'm CEO and owner. Girl power.

This is me, once upon a time. Thank goodness for Getty to document some of life's great memories.

Thanks for stopping by,

Renee Shelton.