It all started when a very pregnant Melissa Starkowski found herself baking a cake in the middle of the night.
Despite not being a sweets person and having no background in baking, it made perfect sense to her, who now has four-and-a-half-year-old twins with her husband, Conrad.
“I was pregnant and I wanted cake.”
Since then, Starkowski has made hundreds of cakes, but not just any old cakes, you know, the ones that many of us may find ourselves making that typically come from a box and say, “Add water.”
Starkowski’s cakes are exquisite. Pieces of art that, if they weren’t edible, would stand the test of time. Her cakes are topped with floral arrangements, fuzzy-looking animals and everything in between. They typically come with buttercream.
Starkowski grew up with her parents, Ron and Charlene Rissanen and two brothers, one of whom she’s a twin with. Her parents own Fox Mountain Automotive, a home-based business that kept the family close together, something that’s important to her today.
After graduating from Columneetza Secondary School in 2010, she headed to Alberta with her uncle to work in highway construction. At work, the baker met her husband (from Ontario), and the two married in 2018 and settled back in Williams Lake.
Starkowski continued in the construction industry, working with her brothers and eventually at Tolko, when she found out she was pregnant. They were also beginning to build a house near her parents’ home on Fox Mountain.
When her water broke at 2:30 a.m., she texted her husband from the bathroom detailing the event, then crawled into bed and fell asleep next to him. When he woke up around 5:30 a.m. — ready to start digging up the foundation for their house — he read Starkowski’s text and took her to the hospital. She was injected with steroids to keep the babies in, and then the couple was flown to Kamloops, where, at 34 weeks and one day, their two healthy girls were born, Raya and Lola. In the meantime, Starkowski’s father and her cousin began digging up the foundation for the family’s house.
After a few weeks in the NICU, the family returned home to Williams Lake, figuring out parenting quickly with “the sweets,” a nickname Conrad gave their twins (it should be noted his wife, he calls sugar). The family continued to stay with Starkowski’s parents until their house was completed about a year later.
Eventually, Starkowski turned back to baking, needing something for herself.
“It was my sanity, in a sense. Something I got to do for me,” said Starkowski. “I like to work. I need to stay busy. So I needed that extra hobby that I could still do while having [children].”
When asked how she bakes six-to-12 cakes per week while juggling being a mother to her twins, who are only in preschool for around two hours a day, she laughed and said she usually doesn’t sleep. It also comes down to a strict schedule. After breakfast, the baking begins, and the twins play or colour — that is if they’re not helping bake (they can already crack eggs without spilling any shells into the mix). After lunch, the twins go to preschool and Starkowski uses this time to go to the gym and grocery shop. After preschool, the girls are picked up and they head home for dinner and bed. Then, she’s back to baking.
Starkowski is in the middle of formalizing her business, Sugar and the Sweets. Conrad (who works at Gibraltar) is in the middle of converting their garage into a commercial kitchen. For Starkowski, the goal is to grow her business while being able to stay home and be close to her family, just like her own family growing up.
Her family, who still live in Williams Lake, are close, and her mom has been instrumental in helping with the twins. Their lives are busy but very whole, with great friends and family. In the meantime, the shelves at the Starkowski’s continue to grow with different kitchen tools.
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