Photo courtesy of Alyssa Fernandez.
Self-proclaimed “Adamson baby” Alyssa Fernandez is changing the way we eat cake.
Born to two Mexican parents who attended William Hardin Adamson High School in Oak Cliff, the senior year surprise baby still has roots to the area. Fernandez says that her parents did a really good job to shield her and her sister from the things that made life difficult.
“I never knew or thought that we were broke or anything,” she said.
Surrounded by the Mexican culture of the community decades ago, Fernandez said she never realized she was a Spanish speaker until public school. Describing the homogenous environment of Oak Cliff at the time, she shared how her father chose to move the family away from the area due to safety concerns.
“He saw someone getting mugged across the street from where we lived,” she said. “Then just someone’s purse getting snatched at a nearby grocery store, he thought, ‘I need to move my daughters now.’”
From there, Fernandez moved to Allen and grew up to teach in Connecticut and enter the journalism industry, even working for The Dallas Morning News and Google. But during that time she said none of those careers felt right.
So, while going through a journey with her relationship with food, she decided to follow her urge to work in the industry.
“My family thought American food was just (best). That was our education, came from TV commercials. We thought what they were selling us was what was best for us. So I just ate a very, say, nutritionally poor diet when I was younger,” Fernandez said.
The turning point in her journey was her desire to improve her wedding cake.
“I was very skeptical of going to a bakery, because I knew most bakeries use some sort of pre-packaged cake mix, and I knew what the ingredients were in that and I just thought, ‘dang, I really don’t want to have to spend money to feed my guests ingredients that I’m going to feel guilty about,” she said.
Following her first iteration of the recipe from her wedding, she pursued what later became Ollin, a brand focused on giving gluten a new reputation without vilifying the ingredient.
Using European stone-milling traditions with TAM 105 grain, designed by Texas A&M University in 1979, and ancient grains, such as rye and spelt. This wheat process differs from other flour goods since these methods create quality ingredients, she said.
“So one of the things I started noticing within our food supply is a reason why we have these commodity crops like you know, the commodity yellow corn, or, just like our standard hard red wheats, is really just made for efficiency and not made with any consideration about where it’s coming from and what the nutritional density could be,” she said.
Fernandez has developed two cake-mixes with better quality ingredients: the “Anyday” Chocolate Cake Mix and the “Golden Hour” Yellow Cake mix. The “Golden Hour” flavor was recently named one of four baking category Startup CPG Shelfie Award finalists.
Through a collaboration with The Meteor located at 1950 Hi Lane, the grain-forward recipe is now being served in her birth city until August 18 as a part of the Cosmic Combo. She said this opportunity is a chance to show the community, especially those who also have roots in Oak Cliff, that good food shouldn’t be a luxury– it should be accessible.
