Sweet Dreams

ALUMNAE TAKE DIFFERENT ROUTES TO UNLEASH THEIR FOOD PASSIONS

For Naima Craft ’07, D’10, baking allowed her to connect with her Trinidadian culture, and childhood memories of her grandmother. For Toni Moshen ’07, it was a way to daydream with her sister and remember her aunt, who loved to bake cakes. And for Sara Mellas ’14, cooking provided much-needed stress relief during graduate school. For these three alumnae, cooking and baking were an important part of their lives. But when they headed off to the University of Hartford, they had an idea of what their careers would look like— and it didn’t involve cake.

It would be years later, when they were settled into those other careers, that opportunities to break out their mixers, icing, and knack for developing recipes presented themselves. Today, through artisan breads, creative cakes, and perfectly styled creations, these alumnae are proof that it’s never too late to change your dream.

Toni Moshen ’07

HARTFORD ART SCHOOL

Toni Moshen ’07

When Toni Moshen would bring in homemade cookies on critique days in her illustration classes at the University of Hartford, her professor always commented that she needed to do something with her baking talents.

But Moshen, as an illustration and graphic design major, pictured herself not baking, but illustrating children’s books. She wrote a children’s book while a student at UHart, and ironically, it was about baking, which Moshen took up as a hobby when she was about seven years old. With the help of her aunt’s old cake decorating magazines, she taught herself to make roses with icing, and she and her sister had dreamed about opening an ice cream store. After graduation, Moshen went on to work as a graphic designer, but that love of baking remained. She was a frequent viewer of the reality baking show Ace of Cakes, and when a friend asked her to make a wedding cake, she took the opportunity, studying YouTube videos on how to make fondant. From that wedding, she got another cake order.

“Graphic design was fun, but it wasn’t anything like designing cakes,” Moshen says. “I found designing cakes to be more hands-on and creative, and more enjoyable seeing the process through to the end product. I knew that’s what I wanted to do. And the second I fell in love with cake making, I knew I was opening a bakery.”

But Moshen had never even worked in a bakery, so she set out to gain some experience. She moved to New York for a possible internship with a well-known cake artist, but ended up making a random visit to Carlo’s Bakery in Hoboken, New Jersey, where she showed owner Buddy Valastro photos of the cakes she designed. He ended up hiring her, and that’s how Moshen ended up on the first two seasons of TLC’s Cake Boss.

In 2011, Moshen and her sister opened Sweet T’s Bakeshop in Haddonfield, N.J. The bakery offers items such as cupcakes, cakepops, and cookies, but is mostly known for its outside-the-box, artistic, custom cakes for weddings, birthdays, and other special occasions.

“I don’t do too much of the actual baking anymore, but my eyes are still on everything, making sure it’s top-notch,” says Moshen. “I create all of the recipes used at the bakery, and design and decorate most of the cakes.”

In that way, Moshen says she still uses all the illustration skills she learned at the University of Hartford—she just puts them to use on cakes instead of paper and uses edible materials.

“I love that I get to do art every day, and it makes people happy,” Moshen says. When she’s not baking, Moshen can be found with her husband and three children. She also runs and still likes to paint. And one day she hopes to publish that children’s book she wrote at the University of Hartford.

Cake by Toni Moshen

Naima Craft ’07 D’10

COLLEGE OF EDUCATION, NURSING AND HEALTH PROFESSIONS

Naima Craft ’07 D’10

Naima Craft started her first baking business as a teenager growing up in Trinidad, when her grandmother bought Craft her first handheld mixer. The two would bake cakes together throughout the week, which Craft’s mom would sell by the slice at her office building.

Today, she’s the owner of The Craft, a bakery in East Granby, Conn., offering everything from croissants and bagels to cinnamon rolls, turnovers, and bread, in addition to a variety of baking classes.

Despite that extra spending cash she earned as a kid, baking as a real career wasn’t always on Craft’s radar. Instead, she headed to the University of Hartford to study physical therapy. Following graduation, she worked in a skilled nursing facility before joining the staff at Hartford Hospital, where she worked her way up to the position of quality safety officer within the home-care division.

“I formed great bonds there, but what I missed was interacting with the community,” Craft says. “I was behind a desk, and I missed that human interaction.”

To scratch that itch, she began to bring in baked treats for her work community, who often told her she should start a bakery.

“And my response was always, ‘Heck no! I’m not opening up a bakery! Do you know how much work that’s going to be?’”

But while she was resistant to the bakery idea at first, Craft was not resistant to showing her co-workers how to bake. She began inviting colleagues to her home, providing wine and charcuterie, and teaching them how to make goodies like croissants and bagels.

“I loved it,” Craft says. “I thought, ‘This is what I want to do.’”

The Craft was born. Craft’s plan was to teach baking classes while maintaining parttime hours at the hospital. But when COVID hit, shutting down activities like the ones she offered, she had to pivot. Instead, Craft became one of the only bakeries in Connecticut delivering baked goods, and business boomed— so much so that she could focus on her business full time. After eight months, The Craft moved to the Swift Factory, a former gold leafing facility in Hartford that was being transformed into an incubator space. In December 2021, Craft moved her business again, to its current location in East Granby.

“We take pride in having everything as handmade as possible and as fresh as possible,” says Craft. “If you come in when we first open at 7, or if you come in at 11, there’s a chance something just came out of the oven five minutes ago.”

Craft says she loves her job because she loves to eat, but also because baking fascinates her.

“It’s such a science,” she says. “Especially bread, which is such a breathing, living organism. I don’t run the bakery; the bread runs the bakery. It intimidates me a little bit, but I’m up for the challenge. I want to continue to learn everything I can about breads, and hopefully be recognized one day as a stop within Connecticut for good, local bread.”

While she strives for that, Craft hopes she can serve as an example to others to follow their passion.

“Just because you start off on a certain path, doesn’t mean that you can’t veer off and pursue your ultimate dream,” Craft says. “There can be a lot of fear and anxiety, but there’s also a lot of joy and celebration when you’re in pursuit. Enjoy that journey."

Pastry by Naima Craft

Sara Mellas ’14

THE HARTT SCHOOL

Sara Mellas ’14

Sara Mellas remembers being three years old and asking her mom to take down the Betty Crocker cookbook from the shelf so they could make something. While she would go on to study music history and vocal performance at the University of Hartford, an intense graduate program in music education at Holy Names University brought her love of creating in the kitchen back into focus.

“I had always baked and cooked, but in grad school, it became an insatiable hobby,” Mellas says. “It was something I could do that didn’t cost a lot of money, didn’t take a lot of extra time, and blocked out the stress of grad school.”

After earning her graduate degree, Mellas began working as the director of music at a church in San Francisco and as an elementary school music teacher before transitioning to become conductor of the San Francisco Boys Chorus. In the Bay area, she met friends who worked for a company called Yummly, a recipe app recently acquired by Whirlpool Appliances. The company was launching a new feature to the app, providing consumers with guided recipe videos that connected to Whirlpool appliances. When the company went looking for someone to develop those recipes, Mellas’s friends recommended her, and she was hired at the beginning of 2018.

Later that year, Mellas won the Kellogg’s Holiday Baking Championship with her creation of a pear berry tart, using Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes cereal. The win got her thinking about her career options.

BEING A FOOD STYLIST IS BEING AN ARTIST.

As Mellas continued her recipe development work, she realized that commercial food styling could be lucrative, as well as creative and fun. She began honing her skills as a stylist and now has her own business styling for commercial and digital advertising, e-commerce, and editorials. Over the past few years, her clients have included Williams-Sonoma, Carl’s Jr., Josh Cellars, and Sam’s Club. Mellas gave her first TED Talk last summer, in which she shed light on the nature of her work.

“Being a food stylist is being an artist,” Mellas says. “What’s interesting about food styling is that most food stylists can do other types of styling, like prop styling. But other stylists can’t always do food styling. You need that technical background—you need to know how to cook. With food styling, you have to be able to make anything, and you need to know all the tools and tricks to make art with food.”

Mellas has also published three cookbooks in the past few years for Rockridge Press: The Easy Baked Donut Cookbook, The One-Pot Casserole Cookbook, and the Quick & Easy Breakfast Cookbook. Having enjoyed the writing process, at the end of last year, she began writing for online publications such as Gastro Obscura and TASTE—and has upcoming pieces for outlets outside of the culinary space.

“I’m always looking to expand and grow,” Mellas says. “I’ve started taking more work beyond food, styling props, and wardrobe. Also, music and performing is my first love, and this has been an unexpected route around that. I’d like to figure out how to integrate everything moving forward.”