Welcome to YaliniBakes! My name is Yalini Ravikumar, and I am a teenager that loves to bake, dance, read, draw,  listen to music, and learn about astronomy! My love for baking began with watching my favorite baking shows like Cupcake Wars and The Great British Baking Show ever since I was a little 4 year old. One of my favorite things to do was to ask my family what flavors they would choose to do, and I would imagine how it would be if I was in the competition! And almost everyday, I would bring my set of tiny pots and pans to our living room and repeatedly ask my mom to give me ingredients so I can “cook”. My mom played along by giving me random vegetables and seasonings while I pretended to be a world renowned chef! Whenever my mom was cooking, I wanted to be the one to mix all of the ingredients together (even though I wasn’t even tall enough to reach the top of the dining table), but unfortunately my big sister always beat me to it! As well as spending time together cooking, joking around and retelling hilarious stories in the kitchen was and still is something that my family does all the time.   

 

    My whole family is from Tamil Nadu, which is a state in South India. My mom has been the main chef in our house my whole life, so I’ve been growing up with the smells of her amazing homemade food. I’ve always enjoyed learning new cooking techniques from my mom, so she is definitely a main part of why I love being in the kitchen. I started my journey of finding recipes and baking things from scratch about two years ago at the age of 11. I was doing an internship at an art camp with my mom during that summer (2019), so I tried to bake as much as I could when I wasn’t busy. Fast forward a year later, COVID-19 started to spread rapidly all around the world and that is when I began to explore and take on new baking projects almost every week. Baking quickly became one of my happy places, and it kept me motivated throughout the whole year. Starting this blog is something that I’ve been so excited about for a while, and I can’t wait to share my baking experiences with all of you! I hope that you enjoy visiting my blog and reading all about my baking adventures!

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