Combining Family With A Home Baking Business—

Home Sweet Home

 By Kaaren Valenta

For most people, raising seven-year-old triplets and operating a French pastry business would be overwhelming. But not for Charlene Maring-Sayegh, who operates The Country Patisserie from a commercial kitchen in her Newtown home.

“[Baking] is a passion for me,” she explains. “I’ve wanted to do this since I was a kid. It’s also my therapy for [raising] my triplets. I thoroughly enjoy [baking] – it’s very relaxing.”

 Ms Maring-Sayegh will be the guest speaker at the Monday, April 2, meeting of Newtown Business & Professional Women at the Inn at Newtown. She will discuss the joy of combining family and business, when the business is something you have long dreamed of doing.

“If you’ve always had a dream of going to art school, but your parents convinced you to go to study business, now is the time to do it,” she said. “If it is something you enjoy, it will help you both mentally and physically.”

Growing up in Easton, Charlene Maring-Sayegh loved to help her mother in the kitchen. When she was graduating from high school, she knew she wanted to go to the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., but there was a two-year waiting list at the school.

“Two years seems like a lifetime to an 18-year-old,” she said. “So I wound up in sales for a cosmetic company. My territory was the three-state area of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York. I did it for 11 years, but I always loved cooking and I took every class available at the Fairfield and Trumbull adult education programs and just about every Wilton cake-decorating course. I just loved to do it.”

She was married and working full-time when she decided to enroll at Peter Kumpf’s French Culinary Institute in New York City. She was three months into the program, attending classes three nights a week, when she learned that she was pregnant with triplets.

“I had to leave the program, but when the triplets were 13 months old I went back and took a weekend course,” she said. “I decided I really like baking and decided to concentrate on it.”

After graduation, she worked two nights a week at a small bakery, and also took classes at the Southern Connecticut State College in New Haven. After moving to Newtown in 1995, several things happened which changed her life.

“My father died when the triplets were 21/2 years old,” she said. “Within a few days of his death I developed symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis. I knew I didn’t want to follow the standard treatment of taking steroids, so I decided to go to naturopathic doctors. I take supplements and get weekly acupuncture, which has been fabulous for me. I also take yoga from Rose Bergen. I have more energy now than before I was diagnosed. It’s incredible because I thought I’d be a cripple.”

While all of this was happening, Charlotte Maring-Sayegh was still baking.

“My mother was very active in social clubs, and I was still getting orders for cakes. So I decided to do a business out of my house,” she said.

Because her father had been a health inspector for the Town of Easton, she knew there were strict regulations about food businesses. She converted part of a walkout basement into a commercial kitchen.

“Before I started, I contacted the Newtown Health Department and the fire marshal. They were great,” she said. “Everything here was built to code. I am subject to frequent local and state inspections, too.”

The business opened three years ago. In addition to making pastries and desserts for private customers, she also bakes for three area caterers and a Brookfield restaurant. She bakes a dozen different varieties of custom cakes, tarts, cheesecakes, and miniature pastries and specialty cookies.

“Chocolate Splendor is popular,” she said. “It is three moist layers of dark devil’s food cake with alternating layers of raspberry and dark chocolate ganache, finished with white and dark chocolate shavings. It can be made without the raspberry, or in a white chocolate version.”

Popular tarts include raspberry linzer, pear frangipane, key lime, apple custard, pecan, lemon sunshine, and white and dark chocolate ganache. “I’m going to add a crème brulee tart, which I’ve just developed,” she said. “My friends have been taste-testing it and all said it is a go.”

Ms Maring-Sayegh uses only real butter, cream, and other fresh ingredients in her baking. “I don’t use anything artificial, no shortening like the usual bakery cakes,” she said. “My cakes have a very short shelf life, but the taste is all the difference in the world.” A wedding cake that she entered in the Connecticut Chef’s Association contest took first place.

“I use fresh flowers or I might take fresh pansies and crystallize them to use as decoration on cakes,” she said. “I also used shaved white and dark chocolate. I think this kind of a presentation is so much better than having writing on a cake, because writing takes away from the artwork – and baking is an art.”

Although her daughters have shown only a little interest in baking, her son Christian loves to be in the kitchen. “He can crack an egg better than I can,” she said. “I think he’s very interested in a culinary career. Unlike the girls, who love chocolate, his favorite is the linzer torte.”

When the children were toddlers, Ms Maring-Sayegh was baking brownies and cookies. These days her triplets eat desserts like ganache, mini eclairs, key lime tarts. In addition to chauffeuring her children to after-school activities, she also makes time to volunteer at lunchtime and at recess at Middle Gate School.

“It’s just a matter of being organized,” she said. “I need five days advance on orders, and more at the holidays. Lots of times I work in the evening after the children are in bed. That’s why it is convenient to have the commercial kitchen here. It works for me to have a home business because I love it.”

The BPW meeting will begin at 6 pm on April 2. Reservations, $18, are required by Friday, March 30. Menu choices are grilled swordfish, tortellini with pesto cream sauce, or glazed ham with au gratin potatoes. Call Shelley Kappauf at 426-6362.

To reach Charlene Maring-Sayegh at The Country Patisserie, call 270-0422.