After a full career as a computer software trainer I opted to follow the passion I held as a young adult. I enrolled in the Pastry Arts course at the French Culinary Institute in New York in September 2003, and graduated with a grand diplôme in July 2004. Holding down a full-time day job and attending three 5-hour classes per week was exhausting, but exhilarating, too, and well worth the long hours and the late commute home.

I come from a family that cooks. Not professionally, mind you, but nevertheless seriously. My mother, an excellent cook, learned from her mother and grandmother. My mom's grandmother came to the US from Budapest as the cook for a middle-class family.

My father is very handy in the kitchen, too. (Too handy, by some accounts!) Dad couldn't get home from work fast enough to help in the kitchen. Mom, quite generously, let him stir, taste and suggest, but she was always in control. Like all mothers, mine had developed eyes behind her head, so she knew what Dad was doing even before he knew what he was doing. He still helps her out to this day. "No one can make a mess of the kitchen like your father", mom says, with a mixture of pride and resignation. "No one is better at seasoning the countertops and my nice clean floors than your dad. Sometimes, even the dish benefits."

Our primary goal at William Mauceri Specialty Baking & Catering is to make you happy, to bring back fond childhood memories of holidays and birthday cakes, of special meals served to you by special people. (Our other goal is keeping the countertops and floors free of seasoning.) By making you happy, we are happy. Afterall, that's what life's all about, isn't it?