How Alex Peña Uses the HAPPY PLANNER

(Gerry Furth-Sides) Every family’s recipes are their own special treasure, but in the case of Alex Peña, his family made baking history in Los Angeles so the HAPPY PLANNER works for him on two levels, both personal and professional.

HAPPY PLANNER solves this problem in a fun way with a book just waiting for 160 recipes and notes, and even provides a tear-out shopping list pad. See below and for more details see //localfoodeater.com/safe-keep-your-ethnic-recipe-treasures-with-happy-planner/

Baker Peña  is known among colleagues as “the bread whisperer,” but to his two daughters, he is known as the dad who bakes an astonishing arrays of pastries and breads in his home baking studio.  Son Alex, and brother Cesar, also in the bakery business, often stop by to revive days of the former Peña generation gathered ’round the kitchen table.  Recipes from the family’s bakers include those from journeymen bakers who traveled north from Mexico, Central and South America and brought with them the best techniques and recipes they evolved and honed along the way.   Among the the world’s most popular and enduring breads, such as  Mexico’s sweet conchas and seasonal favorites pan de muerto (a traditional, large-format bread baked at Dia de Los Muertos, or Day of the Dead) and rosca de reyes (a Christmas holiday sweet bread).

These treasures arrive almost miraculously from memory or somehow turn up as scraps of paper in cookbooks.  They still qualify as heirlooms, whether they show up as hand-written, typed and even in videos.  “They are rarely in one place,”  laughs Alex, who assigned brother Cesar the task of compiling them, with Ivané’s volunteer help.  The good news is that once this is done, The HAPPY PLANNER becomes the collections’ perfect and single home.

In this case, collecting the recipes of his family and of the journeymen bakers in his family’s bakery, La Morenita, amounts to caring out a mission for Master Baker Alex.  He is also gathering together the best of recipes of all the journeyman bakers who worked in his family’s bakery as well as those in his own family.

Alex views baking as much an art form and common thread between distant global cultures, as it is a means to feed one’s family and community.  So just as Alex at BellaRise shares his knowledge and experience to teach the preparation of scrumptious, authentic Hispanic and globally-inspired breads to industrial bakeries, he is also committed to teach his own children, plus new and  experienced home bakers, and instructors.   And as a family activity, it is also fun.