Today we’d like to introduce you to Emma Freeberg.
Hi Emma, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
The 9 Word Version of my story is: Sugar Sublimation evolved into a custom cake side hustle.
I’m a home baker in Knoxville that started learning to bake in order to fill my mind and hands with something other than alcohol when my recovery started. Four years later I have a tiny business, PorchCat Cakes, that produces exclusively layer cakes. Most are custom creations but I have a menu as well, and a cake from me is so much more than just a sugar transaction—it’s an occasion where we get to become a part of each other’s lives and celebrations.
Before getting sober at 31 I’d never even considered baking a cake for fun, much less building a life around designing and executing my own vision of what a cake could be. For long stretches I’d been really creative and by the time I got to college it was to pursue a degree in Drawing. For the first few years I was doing what I thought was the normal amount of college kid partying and working food service jobs for drinking money— but add in an abusive relationship in my early-mid 20s and I eventually left school and quit drawing completely so I could continue to party every day and work full time.
I always really did enjoy being a server—not something you’ll hear as often as we’d all like to think— the tension of a fast-paced dinner service, followed by the calm of 8 o’clock drew me in quickly, and I learned that making people happy made Me happy. Over the next decade or so I also realized how important it was that the food I served was something we could be really proud of and I came to fully appreciate playing an integral part in the customer’s whole experience.
So eventually I went to rehab—by then my health was in serious danger but the deciding factor was that I had found, and lost, a relationship with someone who made me Not Want To Die (deeply in love, just not with myself), wanted for him to live a long and happy life, and for us to be each other’s salvation rather than each other’s enablers. First, I ran straight into a deep, dark hole of Bottom, but he was still ready when I was a few months later so we did wind up quitting and quickly living together again. This year will be 4 years without alcohol for either of us.
When the activity your life revolved around is suddenly the only thing you can’t do… it’s tough. It was a hard 9 months before I found Cake. My entire adult life had been in restaurants but I couldn’t go back to serving, too many temptations and bad habits, but I also didn’t want to give up working with food every day. What I really needed was a hobby, preferably one I didn’t know anything about so that it would take up Lots and Lots and Lots of time. The long nights, especially Fridays were killing me, so I started trying to bake stuff.
First, it was to use up the extra pears my Dad’s trees had borne, but I really enjoyed that custard pie so then some mini cheesecakes (my partner’s favorite), then a complete bloody disaster of a raspberry danish… pastry was not going to be My Thing. Pineapple Upside Down cake was easy enough, and I could put strawberries where the maraschinos usually went so it wouldn’t be too sweet… then a lightbulb: I could make my own creations if I knew what the heck I was doing.
My favorite art teacher, Mr Hillard, told me years ago these two really important things that’ve stuck with me: first, that art is much more interesting when you can see the process behind it, and secondly that the best artists are the ones who learn all the rules first in order to understand how to break them.
That second principle definitely applies to baking, and I’ve tried my best to find ways to implement the first without appearing too amateurish. Layer Cakes seemed like the perfect place to center my education because of the endless decorating options—it’s not a difficult leap to see a cake as essentially a blank canvas. To be honest I was always more of an ice cream person than a cake lover, but there’s nothing quite like quitting drinking to make one suddenly appreciate all the sugar of life in a whole new way.
Cake really became the focus of my days when my partner decided to go back to school and get a new degree that would set him on the path to a career he actually cared about. While he was working in a restaurant kitchen and preparing to throw himself into finding happiness outside of one I was working part-time at a small bakery/catering business that was owned and operated by two women who’d known me in The Before Times (yet still welcomed me back with open arms, my guardian angels) and of course in the evening I was baking, or reading about cake baking, building and decorating techniques, and sometimes about how to run a business.
Eventually one of his co-workers took home a slice of my cake to share with his fiancée only to find a fork and his plate, licked-clean, in their bathroom the next morning. The following week she asked me to bake for their small, backyard wedding; Not fully appreciating the task at hand I said “Of Course!” It became a crash course in attempting things I hadn’t had the heart to yet because of the financial expense.
Baking is an Expensive Hobby. That first cake sale went so well, and was so fun (despite the stress, or because of it) that I thought, “Maybe this will really be My Thing?” The business side of turning my hobby into, if not a lucrative endeavor at least a self-sustaining one, scared the heck out of me—but the fact that I could break even on supplies to keep learning and maybe make a few bucks really excited me.
After I had over a year of attempting to master the basics under my belt, and with a lot of encouragement from family and co-workers who were eating extra cakes I needed to get rid of, I started an instagram account just for my little cake business.
Documentation had became an important aspect of PorchCat Cakes really early. Back in college with my heavy drinking, I was always snapping pictures with my digital camera, scribbling on wristbands or ticket stubs, receipts, any tangible thing to remind me later of what had happened the night, week, a year before. This habit came roaring back when I started baking because I needed to quickly document & later reinforce what had happened when I accidentally left out the sugar or found out how much filling was too much and would result in a wobbly cake.
I shared as much of this education as I could with my tiny audience on Instagram, the missteps and successes were detailed with equal enthusiasm because I was legitimately excited about learning this stuff and improving my skills. I think I was also excited about Being Excited; Sobriety had been terrifying because I couldn’t imagine having any fun without alcohol, but I was having a great time, even just when I was researching—I suddenly gave a shit about what I was learning like I couldn’t remember feeling since I was in Mr. Hillard’s class.
Another aspect of the hyper-documentation was this slightly subconscious desire to prove to my Mom, who wasn’t living in the same city much less in the kitchen with me, that I wasn’t spending my nights secretly drinking; that I was, in fact, putting my healing brain to good use and attempting to build a new life for myself. As it turned out, a lot of other people enjoyed seeing all the behind-the-scenes action too. Mr. Hillard’s principle that the best art shows the process has been proved over and over when I hear from folks specifically about how much they love to watch my Cake Stories.
Writing this, the realizations about all the ways this business has helped me, and why, has come in waves. It feels like PCC happened very gradually and also all at once, but the PorchCat Cakes project continues to change my life every day. Through this hobby-turned-business I’ve been able to combine little pieces of all the good things I lived leading up to it; what started as a diversionary tactic against my worst impulses has led me to so much strength, purpose, and community through creativity and hard work. I’m my own boss of the kitchen, and the numbers, and the marketing, and everything.
Doing all of it alone can be terrifying and overwhelming but I’m so excited to wake up and get to work every day I possibly can… and I definitely couldn’t do any of this if I was drunk.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Never having taught myself anything before there were all kinds of things I had to figure out through trial and error. I’ve never been awesome at grasping scientific concepts/rules (which baking is FULL of) so in order to teach myself to bake there needed to be a specific area of focus. I had to pick one and just do it over, and over, and over while paying attention to what was happening along the way, not just the final product.
I read everything I could and then I’d go try out a recipe, exactly as written, and eventually learned How To Read A Baking Recipe (turns out that’s a thing that isn’t as straightforward as it sounds), figured out little tips that either showed up in multiple reputable sources or just stuff I picked up about myself in the kitchen (like how I’ll forget to preheat the oven, even though it’s the first instruction, so I had to draw an arrow with a star to make sure it was on by Step 4-ish). There’ve been a couple of disastrous cakes, where they were literally falling apart, but since I’d put those “adventures” up online too there was nearly always at least one baker who contacted me with suggestions for how to prevent that in the future.
When I was very freshly sober, like so fresh I was still attending outpatient meetings every day, someone told me “‘No’ is a complete sentence” and that little tidbit helped get me through, or out of, so many personal and social situations I wasn’t mentally prepared for.
Figuring out how to apply that to the business has been tough though. Before I started really trying to make PorchCat be the focus of my life there were times when I thought there had been some mistake… it felt like this cake thing was spiraling out of control and I was just caught up in this sugar-delivering-machine that everyone expected to keep running smoothly.
After an especially stressful, back-to-back-to-back order month I even took 6 weeks off from the business in order to reassess if this was what I wanted to be doing. That whole time, the first holiday season of the pandemic, was strained enough and I didn’t need any additional stressors. To be honest i was worried overwork would make me hate baking and possibly consider turning back to alcohol. Guess what I was really testing was if I would Miss Cake. And I did! I missed having dessert plans to talk to people about and think about all the time… one way Cake has helped my sobriety is that it’s filled my brain, not just my hands, with so many things beyond booze to think about.
Taking that little hiatus felt like something I really needed to do but I was still terrified of the reaction. How dare I refuse to take orders, especially during the holidays. But it went over fairly well—many of my clients and several fellow bakers said things like “good for you” and “way to take care of yourself first, girl”, so that helped ease my insecurities.
And when I was ready to come back to Cake it was with a real sense of purpose because it was such a conscious choice. This would be My Thing not because I physically needed it, or because other people needed a cake, but because it was something I actually loved to do and wanted to build upon.
There were all kinds of rocky business situations I could go on and on about, nearly all of them predicated on my lack of experience. I’ve never run a business before, a lot of this has been based on feel; nearly everything I’ve learned is from the internet and do you know how many differing opinions there are about the way to conduct yourself as a home bakery business?! So many! I have found a lot of support in other small-business owners that I’ve met over the years; Rene and Lisa from my previous bakery job (where I did zero baking) have been incredibly generous in helping me understand what it looks like to run an independent business, and when I finally got too overwhelmed by trying to understand Money and How To Grow my parents stepped up and helped me secure a financial advisor (yet another small, woman-owned business that’s changed my life)
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I try to make every PorchCat Cake unique and memorable but they’re all jam-packed with flavor and different textures. By now I’ve been able to commit to designing a rotating menu every few months; it consists of Set Cakes, as well as a Make-A-Cake Menu of elements to choose from. Those menus are made up of recipes and techniques I’ve already mastered, but clients are still encouraged to order Custom Cakes which often means I’m going to learn something new in order to deliver the very best iteration possible of their dream or my dream for them.
All PCCakes are 6” in diameter but can be quite tall, making them appropriate for small to medium-sized gatherings— I prefer to explain my portions in square inches instead of “serving sizes” because it seems that is such a subjective thing and really varies from person to person and party to party. Ten teenagers are going to eat a completely different amount of cake as ten adults where some don’t like sweets, some are dieting, but then two or three have huge sweet tooth’s…see? It’s a silly thing to try and predict.
My hope is that I’m known for making cakes that are really fun and interesting to eat. When I started looking beyond decorations I was surprised to find how rare it is that a “home bakery cake” is composed of more than just sponge and frosting; the key was figuring out what I like in a dessert, and then how to express that in the structural confines of a cake—it turned out there were other people who also seemed to appreciate some variety in the textures of each bite.
So there’s that… PCCakes are just very Extra. In the beginning I was drawing out a blueprint for every order, so people would know what they were eating, and it gave me a little drawing time which is always good for the soul. Cake blueprints are pretty rare nowadays though because I had to add a small fee once I ran out of my own stash and started having to buy supplies; however, I do still make a watercolor logo tag for every order, happily customized to feature the recipients favorite colors. Personalized packaging is a combination of necessity and desire to make at least some tiny bit of art every time (art that won’t be immediately eaten, that is).
It’s funny but I’m most proud of being accepting enough of myself to lets everyone, customers and followers, behind the scenes and into my life/kitchen quite so much. I’m not shy about my recovery, or the terribleness that came before it because No Drunk is going to go looking for a Sober Living instagram page, but they might accidentally find themselves on one while checking out one of their local bakers. Stories of alcoholics who don’t hate their Sober lives is something that all the Active Alcoholics need to hear, whenever and wherever possible, even if it’s through a little bait and switch trickery. I know for a fact that there are people who’re still fully In their addiction that look at my cakes so hopefully at least one of them reads the captions as well. It’s also really good for non-addicts to see that just because their favorite alcoholic is killing themselves Now doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll always be that way. If my happiness and small corner of success brings a few people some hope then of course that’s something I like to highlight every couple of weeks.
My business’ instagram account also doubles as a baking journal for myself so I’m almost always making a very detailed story of what happened along the way to the finished product; all the drool-worthy things, the small-businessy stuff, the scary moments when I had to throw a sliding cake into the freezer to prevent total collapse, and sometimes writing recipes down verbatim (plus whatever changes I might’ve made so I’ll know for next time).
I think people really enjoy knowing what’s going on, and I love sharing it with them, because it’s like they’re in the kitchen with me day-to-day, watching my little side hustle grow and cheering when I finally complete an especially intimidating or technically difficult new task. I try to be super honest with everyone, probably to a fault, and definitely as a direct result of being so newly sober. It’s a better way to live, free from the habitual lying that addiction binds you up in, and then there’s Cake at the end.
Alright, so to wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share with us?
The name. I struggled to come up with a business name for months and not finding one I loved actually held me back from officially starting my business until September of 2019. There was an incredibly tragic period when two people in my circle, people I’d known and who were close friends with people I dearly love, died suddenly—under separate circumstances— at a very young age.
While we were grieving for these losses, surrounded by pain, I was of course reminded of the preciousness of every day, and felt like waiting any longer to pursue this passion was a waste of the gift of life. At the time it even felt disrespectful, to them, to my new sober life, to my partner and my parents who had helped me come back from near death, that I should let a little thing like an Instagram profile name stop me from at least attempting to follow through a bit more with this Cake education that I’d started.
This thought kind of hit me like a ton of bricks, very late at night, while I was smoking a cigarette on my porch outside the apartment. So I was pacing, saying names out loud, checking to see if they already existed, pacing, smoking. And then Ian, the cat who had come with our house—a neighborhood alley cat who really, really preferred our porch above all others, so, our “porch cat”— walked up and rubbed against my legs.
We had two cats already, brothers Ham and Ace who we’d raised since tiny kittens, but Ian was a cat for Everyone. He was the sweetest creature, always so happy, always excited to see new faces be they furry or human, and seemed to have a pretty excellent life even though he lived on the streets/porches… but he was also pretty scruffy around the ears, often dirty from dust baths, and definitely looked like he had been through some battles.
By then it was 3 AM on 9/19/19 so I went with PorchCat Cakes, at first just as a placeholder, but the more I thought about it the more fitting it seemed. My cakes were never going to be perfectly decorated—when I found my own style I wanted it to be full of character—I was going through some battles of my own, but through sobriety and cake I was also able to surround myself with supportive and enthusiastic new friendships. He died in late January of the next year, after being taken inside, out of the winter, and leading a slightly more domesticated existence with our shared porch neighbor.
It turned out he’d had a kidney infection for quite some time, as well the Feline AIDS we had learned about from the apartment’s previous tenants. His last gift to me was this name, and I hadn’t even realized what a gift it was at the time. My logo is based off a photo I took of him once, from my smoking chair (I’ve quit by now btw) and every cake order comes with a hand painted watercolor background that’s stamped with our namesake cat, so I still get to see the sweet boy every day.
Contact Info:
- Email: Porchcatcakes@gmail.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/porchcatcakes
