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Scones, Best Baked With Friends

marie shakespeare making scones

Come into Marie Shakespeare's kitchen with us today. We're making Apricot Almond Mini Scones.

"I'm also a lighting designer and I teach lighting design at Indiana University, and my students are forever misspelling 'sconce' as 'scone,'" she said. "So, on the last day of class this year, I brought them these scones, and I said, ‘These are scones. They don't light up. They're delicious.'"

She's worked as a part-time baker at One World Catering for a couple years. Marie has always worked lots of part-time jobs. She always tries to keep a toy job, where she makes a little money doing it but it's more about the fun than anything else. A couple years ago, her toy job just wasn't cutting it anymore:

Things always change and shift and there was one day that I said to myself, ‘You know, I wonder if I'm really still having fun here. I think I'll write down every shift I work kind of one a scale of one to ten how much fun I'm having.' And that lasted like two shifts, and I went, ‘I'm not having fun anymore. That's just wrong.' So I quit, and then Lynn said, ‘I really do need help in the kitchen, you wanna come and cook? You wanna come and try it? It'd be fun.'

Lynn Schwartzberg, general manager of One World Catering, also began baking in her kitchen. She was running a small business out of her home called Bakery Girl, "And I wasn't sure I was ready to have a full-time life doing it. I was going to use some space here, and Jeff said, 'Oh we'll never use all this space,'" she says. Jeff Mease is the co-founder and CEO on One World Catering. He allowed her to use space in their professional kitchen:

So he brought me over and the kitchen was quiet and the walk-ins had all this space in there, and I thought, ‘Oh that could be interesting.' And then I decided I hated my job, so I sent an email out to a very small group of people who knew me in various ways, and I was very honest. I said, ‘This is my skill set. If you ever think of anything you could use me for, I'm looking to change my life.' And I got an email from Jeff! And he said why don't we go have breakfast.

That was five and a half years ago. Lynn started working 20 hours a week, mostly baking. As the business grew, so did her responsibilities. She realized she needed help with all the baking, and that's where her friend Marie Shakespeare came in. "She's particularly skilled at scones, coffee cakes. She's kind of a breakfast baker, and she was terrifically helpful," says Lynn.

Now, as Marie puts it, she's part of a team of "ladies of a certain age" who work in the bakery side of One World. She strives to work enough hours per week at her new toy job to earn enough money to pay her health care premium.

Lynn, on the other hand, rarely bakes and instead focuses full-time on administrative work. But whenever there's a big order of biscuits, she's eager to jump in front of an oven.

"It's really funny because we live in a community that's full of academics and it's full of professionals, and being a regular worker is not exactly idolized. We have all experienced some of that feedback. 'Oh, such a lowly job. You do what? Oh,'" she says. "And we find (food work) to be really gratifying."

More: This story began years ago, when Lynn borrowed space in the One World kitchen to grow her small business. Now, One World rents space in its commissary kitchen to several local food businesses. Read about its kitchen share program.

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