I was fired; it defined me for 24 years.

When Tremont 647 opened in 1996, Andy Husbands hired me as the pastry chef. My pastry experience was limited to what I learned in culinary school and a short stint as chef in a café in Washington, DC. Like many young culinary school grads, I thought I was better than I really was. And I was cheap: Andy could hire me for a much lower salary than a more experienced baker. The combo of confidence and cost-effective landed me the job.

Andy wanted banana cream pie as the signature dessert. In the days leading up to the initial opening, we tested out the recipe. I retreated to the basement kitchen and started rolling out pie dough and cooking up pastry cream. The pastry cream – a simple combination of eggs, milk and sugar is thickened with corn starch. I put the mixture on the stove and began to heat it through… stirring and stirring as to not scramble the eggs. It started to thicken, and I kept cooking and stirring to get to the right consistency. And then after a few minutes, *splat*. The corn starch denatured, and I had soup. I looked back at my recipe, trying to figure out what I did wrong. And tried again. After 3 failed attempts at pastry cream, Andy lost his patience and fired me.  He didn’t have time to train a pastry chef on opening day.

Since then, I’ve baked very little. I had a few recipes I could make for my catering business, but that was it. “I’m not a good baker,” I told myself. Some people are bakers, others are cooks. I’m a cook!

I often have clients tell me, “I’m not good with numbers.” They use it as a reason as to not devote the appropriate time to bookkeeping and financial management. I push and prod that they can learn to be good with numbers, but they have this mental block. Maybe they struggled with math in high school; or had some other traumatic experience. And how can I really judge them since I had given up on baking.

Until the covid-quarantine.  Twenty-four years later, I finally had the space and time to start baking again.  I decided to tackle my baking demons and make pastry cream (though this time in the form of Boston Cream Pie). I read up on pastry cream, looked at all sorts of recipes to find the common themes. And into the kitchen I went. I was feeling pretty good. My cake was light and moist, and I thought to myself, “I’ve got this.”

Then I started on the pastry cream. I didn’t want to stir too much, because I knew that the corn starch could denature. I didn’t want to cook it too much because I knew the eggs could scramble.

This experience reminded me of “The Four Stages of Learning”.

When we first tackle a new skill… we are at stage 1: unconsciously incompetent. That’s where I was when I landed the job with Andy. I had no idea what I didn’t know.  I didn’t know that corn starch could be so finicky. After my failed attempts, I was at stage 2: consciously incompetent. I now recognized that I was incompetent at baking. And it would take practice to get to the third stage, conscious competence stage – where you can be successful at the task, but you need to think it through.  It takes lots of experience to get to the fourth stage of unconscious competence (that’s where I’m at with cooking and bookkeeping).

Most of you are at stage 4 (unconscious competence) in your businesses. You know how to farm, cook, and sell; and you don’t even think about it… you just do it.  It can be frustrating to add tasks to your to-do list – whether its managing employees, marketing or bookkeeping. You land in stage 2 (consciously incompetent). It can be especially frustrating when you’re so good at other tasks. People often forget that they went through the 4 stages of learning for farming and cooking; and attribute skills to innate ability. That’s where I was with pastry cream.  Making the leap from stage 2 to stage 3 (conscious competence) can be the most frustrating.

Back to my pastry cream from two weeks ago: it was a flop. With all my worries of stirring too much or scrambling the eggs, the cream was too thin and tasted starchy. My partner’s son said it was bland.

This past weekend, a friend invited me over for a socially distant, outdoor dinner. She asked me to bring dessert. Clearly, she hadn’t read the memo that I don’t bake. But I accepted the challenge (not that she knew all the back-story), and decided to try, yet again, pastry cream and Boston Cream Pie.

And finally – 24 years and many attempts later, I finally got the pastry cream right.

The moral of the story… with a little patience in the process, you can learn new skills. You can learn financial management or baking or anything else if you give it the time and effort. And while it likely won’t come overnight, you can probably do it in less than 24 years.