Before I baked cookies, I baked a mess.

I grew up on an orchard in New York’s Hudson Valley, surrounded by the scent of apples and the hum of family life. Our little country road was named Ridge Road.

My earliest memory of baking isn’t exactly a success story — it involves leading my sisters in “borrowing” my mother’s five-pound bags of flour meant for Christmas cookies, opening them all at once, spilling flour across the sofa, and jumping up and down in it like snow. That was my first foray into baking — and my first lesson in creativity (and cleanup).