I'm Cristina, a woman of few ingredients, but weighed precisely, like any recipe in the bakery. No improvers, no frostings and no fancy decorations. Simple and natural.
As a child I was "grandma's housewife" and cleaned all the pans in which my mother or grandmother prepared the dough for the cake.
At the same time, I had a justice spirit and appreciated justice since I was a child. I loved making and sharing rules. Maybe it's also because I grew up in the "must" era. You must learn, you must eat, you must behave, you must listen.
Although I am shy, I seem to prefer contrasts, or else the steps to what I have achieved today were taken without me realizing it.
The first unconscious act of courage was choosing a humanities major in high school, my great love actually being mathematics. I haven't forgotten my childhood dream. I wanted to be a lawyer and that's how I ended up at law school in Bucharest. There, apart from the "kitchen of law", another kitchen started to attract me more and more. A sweet one of 2 square meters, the studio where I lived.
Friends would come to visit during baking sessions and ask me for "something sweet". Apart from my mother's bread with butter and strawberry jam, sent to the North Station, I had started experimenting, and John my husband now told me that by the time of the wedding there would be no whole piece of Cristina left, so many marks I had from the heated oven.
Nevertheless, I continued to follow a straight path, without too many detours, without deviating from my childhood dream. I worked in the legal field for two years. However, in 2012, without giving it much thought, I enrolled on a course for bakers. For three months, I pushed trolleys through the halls of a 5-star hotel in Bucharest and learned from the best pastry chefs.
At the same time I was completing my master's degree in business law, but my childhood ideal of becoming a lawyer was fading. I would see the corn bubbling in the jar and the muffins growing in the oven and these little things brought me more joy than any solved case. It was the joy of being able to be creative again like when I was a kid. In fact I think I was refusing to become an adult.
Shortly afterwards I returned to my parents' backyard where I had a dream wedding, and 3 months after that I became pregnant. This was the moment when I started looking for a place in Bucharest where I could have the bakery of my dreams. Being pregnant, a few days before I was due to give birth, although I had all the necessary facilities to receive the authorization for my first laboratory, I was refused without any legal basis, on a Saturday when only one person showed up for the inspection. Doesn't sound good, does it? I used everything I learned in my years of law school and finally succeeded. I had the operating permit for my first lab.
I learned to walk again, I fell many times, I was set back, but I also had the feeling that I would conquer the world. I didn't hesitate. Many times, I felt like I was held by God's hand. Through my parents, through my other half, and later through our children.
I was determined and I said Yes! To any challenges. And I don't consider myself brave. The time to think was after... "what have I gotten myself into?", "how do I get out of it?".
That's it! I'm baking cookies! That's what we've been saying since the day Peter, our first child, announced he was coming into our lives. 9 months this good soul accompanied me everywhere: to the town hall and other institutions, we bought spoons and pots together...
In 2014, with a cute baby in my arms and a sweet kitchen with a license, we hit the road. This time the straight and safe path that we have been walking for 6 years.
"Cristine de casa" seemed like a predestined name for the path this story was to take. Apparently, it was only related to my name and to the homemade cakes I used to make in my studio when I was a student, but with my second child, a new desire was born: to return to our hometown, Suceava. Bucharest was no longer a city that inspired me.
I had been waiting for the change for 2 years, until the beginning of the pandemic, when I, my husband, my 2 children and Ionut, the little fish of the family, returned home. The Cristina’s followed us.
The children have grown up in the last 3 years, as has the non-widow “Cristine de casa”. The desire to change, to draw a line and start again is constant, it's something that defines me, but I don't want to change the story. It still has many chapters.
