Why Is There a Hole in This Cake?

If you've ever asked me that question in person, you already know my answer: go watch My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and then come find me.

I'll wait.

Okay, you're back. You know the scene. Toula tries to explain her family to Ian's very buttoned-up, very beige parents, and somewhere in the middle of introducing him to an entire extended family who communicates primarily through food, someone hands over a bundt cake — and Toula's mother just...stares at it, trying to be polite. They don't understand what to do with a cake that has a hole in the middle — where's the rest of it!? It doesn't fit the shape they expected dessert to come in. And that, weirdly, is the whole thesis of my business.

I'm not Greek. I'm Italian — through and through, nonna's recipes and all. But the first time I watched that movie, I didn't feel like an outsider looking in on someone else's culture. I felt like I was watching my own family with different names. The volume of everyone talking over each other. The absolute non-negotiability of eating something the second you walk through the door. The idea that love, apology, celebration, grief — all of it — gets said through a plate before it ever gets said out loud. Windex problems aside, that movie could've been filmed in my house.

So when it came time to name a business that was going to be about baking and about bringing people together, "There is a Hole in This Cake" wasn't really a branding decision. It just was the name. It's a wink to anyone who's ever sat at a table where three generations argued about whose sauce recipe was correct while somehow also setting a fourth place for a neighbour who just wandered in. It's a nod to the fact that a cake — even an imperfect one, even one with a literal hole in it — is still the whole point of the gathering.

I've been featured on Food Network Canada's Wall of Bakers, I specialize in cookies (they ship better, they hold up better, and honestly they let me be a little more obsessive about detail), and every once in a while I'll still take on a cake for the right occasion. Somewhere along the way, baking turned into full event coordination — because it turns out if you're already the person people call when they need dessert for a wedding, you're also, apparently, the person they call to help plan the whole day. So now I do both: I bake, and I help build the table everyone gathers around, down to the linens and the signage and the little details nobody notices unless they're missing.

But if I'm honest, none of that is really why I do this. I do this because I grew up believing that a table wasn't really full until it was overflowing, and that the best conversations happen with a fork in your hand. I do this because there's something almost sacred about being the person who makes the cake, the cookies, the dessert table people gather around — not because it's flawless, but because it's there, and it's made with the specific kind of love that only shows up when food is involved.

There's a hole in this cake because the cake was never supposed to be the point. The point was always the people around it.

Buon Appetito. 🍪