Ciao and Welcome to CaffeIna!
My name is Sara and I'm an Italian transplanted to Oakland, CA.
I always loved baking but never did it too much while I was in Italy. In 2006 I moved to the US for my PhD studies in Davis. The low stipend and the lack of interesting things to do in Davis brought me to bake much more often. I immediately got passionate about it and I started to bake almost every day. It became my anti-stress while studying, plus I loved seeing the happiness in the eyes of my friends when I was bringing my goodies to class. In July 2009 I moved to the Bay Area and a few months later I revolutionalized my life: I got married and I finally decided to drop out of the PhD and follow my real passions, baking and working with kids.
At the moment, I work as a pre-school teacher assistant in a fanstastic Italian immersion school in San Francisco, La Piccola Scuola Italiana. Working with kids is an adventure. It's fun, it's challenging, it's creative. I think it's the most rewarding job I've ever had. What I most like is that every day I learn, together with them, a little bit more about children, about myself, about small and big things of life.
Teaching does not keep me busy full time and so I still have a lot of time to bake. I have no formal training, although I dream of going to baking school. Most of the recipes on this blog are family recipes (adapted to American ingredients) or recipes found on different websites, blogs, magazines, books. Growing up in Italy, I had never made things like scones or brownies or cupcakes until I moved to the US, so I don't have "grandma recipes" for those but I do get very excited about finding recipes online and I can really spent days in finding and elaborating them.
Some time ago, my husband, Wally, suggested me to take advantage of the long period of transition (I had just applied for the green card) to start a blog as an outlet for my passions so...here it is! This is my very first blog and I'm in part excited and in part dubious about this new adventure. I do not really love technology but I do love baking and kids...and that's what this blog is meant to be about.
The name, CaffeIna, comes from two things put together: the fact that caffeina is the Italian for caffeine (ok, that was pretty obvious, right?) and the fact that the suffix -ino or -ina is used in Italian to make the diminutive of a word. In this way, I did not intend to refer to a small coffee but to the fact that I would love this blog to be also about baking with kids. One day, I hope I will be able to put these two things together. Until now I have experimented making bread and cookies with the kids at school but there is much more work (and fun) to come...
I hope you will enjoy going through the recipes of my blog as much as I enjoy writing it. As a good Italian, I also love talking :) I am always happy to talk to people about food, children or anything else in life. Whether you are a food blogger or not, whether you are a teacher or not, whether you are curious about a recipe or not I would love to hear from you.
Feel free to get in touch with me by email at sarabonetti77@gmail.com or through twitter @Caffeiiina
The name, CaffeIna, comes from two things put together: the fact that caffeina is the Italian for caffeine (ok, that was pretty obvious, right?) and the fact that the suffix -ino or -ina is used in Italian to make the diminutive of a word. In this way, I did not intend to refer to a small coffee but to the fact that I would love this blog to be also about baking with kids. One day, I hope I will be able to put these two things together. Until now I have experimented making bread and cookies with the kids at school but there is much more work (and fun) to come... I hope you will enjoy going through the recipes of my blog as much as I enjoy writing it. As a good Italian, I also love talking :) I am always happy to talk to people about food, children or anything else in life. Whether you are a food blogger or not, whether you are a teacher or not, whether you are curious about a recipe or not I would love to hear from you.
Feel free to get in touch with me by email at sarabonetti77@gmail.com or through twitter @Caffeiiina