Cute Cakes Grand Opening

 

 

There was a full house all night for the grand opening of Cute Cakes in Escondido, CA tonight. Members from the community came to welcome the business with open arms as they have spent their years growing helping other businesses within the community thrive. Jill Reilly started out in her own kitchen seven years ago, working to get where she is now, and continuing to thrive throughout San Diego County as she has been operating her downtown location for the past two years. The room was filled with friends, family, government officials, and honorary guests.

I have been lucky enough to find myself in the company of this group of wonderful people. They show great talent in their work as they design the baked goods featured in their stores to fit the dreams and inspirations of every body that walks into their assemblage. My husband and I were impressed at the work they had done to create our wedding cake three years ago and have gone back every year since to get the same exact Virginia Apple Walnut Cake with Peanut Butter and Raspberry Jelly filling for our anniversary. I spent months looking for a local baker that would do gingerbread for our wedding and Jill was the only bakery to answer to the challenge. They did an amazing job. Even their own staff has yet to forget that cake order.

Hall-Walbourne wedding cake by Cute Cakes November 3, 2012. Photo by Leslie Dunn.

Now that Cute Cakes has been blessed enough to grow to the size they have as present, they are using their space wisely and helping other businesses in ways that help them to promote their own companies within the same location; share the space for meetings and group events; and promote their work throughout the bakery; even hold meetup groups. Now, guests that frequent Cute Cakes can come in for tea, have party’s, join in on fun baking classes, and enjoy breakfast and lunch along with all their well known treats. The bakery will continue to be hosting Gingerbread Haunted House decorating this Halloween Weekend. And then continuing the fun by doing gingerbread houses for the Winter Holiday season.

Having fun making haunted gingerbread houses with Cute Cakes, by Anne S. Hall.

All this week Cute Cakes will be officially celebrating their Grand Opening. This Wednesday will officially be day 3 of the festivities, as they will be holding raffles all throughout the day. See more of the festivities at http://www.facebook.com/cutecakessd/?fref=ts and cutecakes-sd.com

Cute Cakes – Escondido. From a small team of three to this wonderful growing team of today!

 

Calendar of Events provided by Cute Cakes of San Diego.

North County Arts Network has a successful year

North County Arts Network (NCAN) has successfully completed its first year of operation and concluded with its final quarterly meeting for the year.  What’s next?  Action!  With more than 80 members of the arts community attending the gathering in Carlsbad this evening, Coordinator, Daniel Foster, greeted participants with encouraging motivation to act now in order to reach out to local government officials to share funds to help support the arts within the North County region.

With North County San Diego being one-third of the entire population of San Diego County at 1.3 million people, from a total of 3.5 million people strong, most of the attention and support for the arts radiates around the city of San Diego itself rather than the surrounding communities.  North County has grown to these vast numbers in just the last decade and will continue to grow as rapidly over the next.  Cities like Encinitas, San Marcos, Carlsbad, Vista, Oceanside and Escondido all have their own resources and focuses within industry and towards the arts.  The evenings panel discussion focused on combining all of these assets in order to help each community promote these qualities in order to help the region as a whole.

“I believe every city will create their own experience and focus,” said Jerome Kern, City of Oceanside Council Member.  Regional assets are all different.  Attracting businesses to the regional benefits should be considered as an attraction point to our communities.  Point to those assets to help other cities and we will all benefit together.

This network of community has proven a desire, motivation and need.  Thus, the NCAN will be spending the rest of its efforts in 2016 establishing the previously proposed committees for Visual and Performing Arts Programming, Arts Education, Civic and Public Art, Arts Funding and Economic Development, and Arts Marketing and Audience Development for the population of North County San Diego.  All of these committees will begin action early December.

Council Member, Jerome Kern, of the City of Oceanside; Carl Morgan of the Economic Development Council of San DIego North; Coordinator, Patricia Frischer, of the San Diego Visual Arts Network; and Daniel Foster, Coordinator of North County Arts Network.

There are 2,500 regional art resources.  Yet, it is still untapped.  More than 700 billion dollars in revenue comes from the arts, but California is 44 in support of the arts.  “We’ve always seen art as a catalyst for change all throughout history,” said Patricia Frischer, Co-ordinator for the San Diego Visual Arts Network.  We should take the art so that it can travel and change in order to adapt to its environment and make that the image of NCAN’s foundation.  To move within our communities and identify with the various cultural aspects that thrive within our region.

There are 429 nonprofit organization in San Diego and 44% of those nonprofits are located in North County.  The arts help to support aspects of life that are economically driven.  The city of Fallbrook is a great example of this, with its Avocado Festival attracting more than 100,000 tourists to their community every year, along with their hosted arts summit and support of the arts in their yet to be accredited School of Arts and Arts Center, according to Carl Morgan of San Diego North’s Economic Development Council.  “If we make art the center point it becomes the economic driver” that our communities need to enrich the culture and support the arts community that helps community and business flourish.

The next quarterly event for NCAN will take place on Thursday, January 21, 2016 at the Poway Center for the Performing Arts.  For more information, contact Daniel Foster at danielfosterart@aol.com

Loss and Revitalization

Etching by Eylish Sweeney of her father, Tim Sweeney, replicating my promotional photo of his comedy show.

So, I’m baaack… officially. After taking nearly two months to consider what I’m doing with my work and how I should consider taking my skills and using them to better contribute to community. After the loss of Wayne Dyer, and wondering how much I should reconsider how my work is purposed, with two people who have quickly come in and out of my life with passing on to something beyond living… I considered how much they both worked to bring people together in order to help ‘community’ above all else. Considering how we can all benefit one another with a common goal of making the world a better place. And loving every bit of it all.

Katie and Tim Sweeney always said, “Take the cards you’re dealt.” They’ve been given to you for a reason so use them to the best of your benefit! Looking back at life seems to make it easier to see those prosperous traits that always existed in my nature. The natural state of being that came so easily before judgement and question of talent ever came to play. I had been writing since I was six years old and could write 10 page papers in two days before I hit the age of 10. Piles of journals full of poetry that I wrote since I was a kid, up until I turned 20… and then everything stopped.

I was too concerned about making it to tomorrow. Wondering how getting by was going to be achieved. By then, there was a huge recession. It was the beginning of the 21st Century. I was looking for my place in life and was completely lost in the uncertainty of it all. My ambition to be a scientist drove me to my next adventure, but during those years I truly lost all recollection of that natural state of being that kept me up late at night and poured out of me like provenance.

Going back to college, I got it all back like a serendipitous mistake; looking for ways to expose myself as a photographer and forgetting that I had the skill to write because of all those years of writers block that lingered beneath that resonated haze that kept me from remembering how much I could do and how versatile I was at making words make sense on paper so much more than I could in practice physically.

At this point, with so many stories to tell… so many that have proven to help others, yet I’ve continued to lack the courage to share them beyond people I could trust or knew that truly needed to hear them… the loss of these two great man left me to consider whether I should be doing more with this skill…

Following this path in life has driven me to amazing people! I keep following this path and I keep finding myself rewarded with each moment that I work to help people and bring people together. Finding a life within the art community was one that I never fathomed for myself! I was always told that it was something that wasn’t profitable and could not be a means for supporting ones self in order to thrive in any society. I’ll admit, I never worked as hard in my entire life as I have and continue to as I pursue this line of work, but I have also never seen quite as much accomplishment and fulfillment has I have with every tiny step I’ve taken to help others in their endeavors as a writer/photojournalist.

So, with these near two months past, and attending my last NCAN (North County Arts Network) meeting for the year, I have been reminded of how much people value my skills and how much I AM needed in doing what I do. For the better.

I help nonprofits in various ways! I’ve written news articles to help inform the public about important issues. Even one’s that I preferred to avoid… I’ve continued to find amazing work with wonderful people that have a common interest in helping others. And I’ve done so much to get to this point where I am skilled and able enough to help the arts community in San Diego.

Maybe it wasn’t so much of a coincidence that I ended up finishing college with a BA in Arts and Technology, with am emphasis in photojournalism; a double minor in Film Studies and Dance; and two AA’s in Art and Studio Art. The people I am finding at this point in my life are working to improve life and culture within my community and can very much use these types of skills.

So, after all this personal debate, I’ve come to the conclusion that not much is going to change. The personal rewards keep coming and they’re continuing to make others happy, so I’m just going to keep doing what I’m doing until something else comes up to make me reconsider the focus of my work. Sure, all the Arts and Entertainment coverage I provide is great fun, but everything I do in the background that doesn’t appease the masses in pop culture’s highly rated industry work deeply touches the lives of individuals and community that profoundly appear to benefit in development and outcome.

May the good times roll!