Sweet success for Healdsburg student who baked her way to UC Berkeley

Anamaria Morales was still a senior at El Molino High School when she set a lofty intention. She vowed to bake her way to UC Berkeley - one cheesecake at a time.

As the College Confectionista, Morales juggled classes at Santa Rosa Junior College while spending every spare moment in the kitchen. With a smart social media campaign she tantalized her followers on Facebook and Instagram with an ever-changing menu of fresh and seasonal flavors and themes: red velvet and eggnog at Christmas, Bailey’s Irish Cream for St. Patrick’s Day, salted caramel pecan for Thanksgiving. We wrote about her ambitions in this section in April 2017.

Her signature style was 1950s retro, an irresistible mixture of old-time magazine ads and pictures of the copper-haired, freckle-faced baker herself, in big hats or colorful handkerchiefs, smiling like a girl-next-door advertising poster from the Elvis era - always bearing a cheesecake.

Well, three years and countless thousands of cheesecakes later, the 21-year-old entrepreneur is preparing to head off to her “goal school” in August with enough money socked away to cover her ?educational expenses, without having to rely on student loans.

It hasn’t been a cakewalk. She was turned down twice by Berkeley, once in high school and again last year, before finally receiving an acceptance letter this spring, while studying abroad in Florence, Italy.

“I was crying all night,” she said. “Happy tears.”

Morales will head down to Berkeley in August and also feels a bit wary, she said, like a jilted girlfriend whose boyfriend now wants her back.

She applied last year to Berkeley’s prestigious Haas School of Business after completing two years at SRJC, confident that her high grades and real world business experience would power her through.

Morales subscribes to a belief in the power of affirmative thought and the law of attraction.

“I’ve read every self-help, leadership and spiritual book known to mankind,” she says.

Her bedroom in the Healdsburg home, where she lives with her parents Tom and Laura Morales, is adorned with 1950s tin plate advertising, pictures of Elvis and a huge assort of inspirational quotes she’s collected from positive thinkers like Albert Einstein, Deepak Chopra, Oprah Winfrey and Pearl Buck. She’s also included some of her own quotes, like this one: “Gratitude brings more into your life.”

Morales was so determined to manifest that acceptance letter through the power of suggestion that she created a fake acceptance letter and Photoshopped The Haas School of Business on the letterhead, along with the dean’s signature, and put it in the mail to herself the day she was supposed to receive her official acceptance or denial last year.

“I read it over and over. I had stickies in my car saying, ‘I’m so happy I got into Berkeley,’” she recalled. And then the rejection came.

“In my room I have all these affirmations and I had my Cal pennant and I didn’t get in. It was crushing. I thought I’ll just try to manifest it as hard as I can. After a week I tore down my pennant. This time, I just kind of let it go. I applied and thought, if it’s meant to be it will be.’”

This time she knocked on a different door at Berkeley. Instead of applying to the business school, with an acceptance rate of only 5 percent, she applied to the School of Arts and Letters, where she will major in Communications, with a particular interest in marketing and social media.

In the long run, it may be a better path, she said, always the optimist.

She figures she can take the business courses at Haas that interest her, without following the full business curriculum she’d rather avoid, like more calculus.

One thing she can’t calculate is the sheer number of cheesecakes it took to pay for both Santa Rosa Junior College and the next two years at Berkeley. She prefers not to disclose her bank balance.

“I just know for a fact that I paid for every single textbook, every single online access code, every single class for the JC for three years. And for the two years I will go to Berkeley, I will be debt free and then some,” she said. “I will probably work anyway, because that’s what I know. I don’t think I can just be a student.”

For the past three years Morales spent untold hours in a commercial kitchen in Healdsburg, baking alone, deep into the night, listening to podcasts to stay awake.

“I’d wake up at 7, and get prepped. And then I would be in the kitchen until 3 a.m. The commercial kitchen is in this dark area. I wouldn’t say it’s sketchy. None of Healdsburg is really sketchy,” she says. “But there are no lights. Sometimes I’d have my brother stay with me in the kitchen and do his homework just so I wouldn’t be alone. I have this video of my mom sitting at the kitchen table and snoring with this airline pillow and it’s 4 in the morning.”

She whipped up 300 cheesecakes for Christmas alone. It blows her mind to imagine how many people have sampled her confections, a New York-style recipe she perfected and made her own, and then customized in scores of ways - Coco Peanut Butter Swirl, Blackberry Bomb, Cinnamon Gingerbread, Dulce de Leche.

This month it’s Banofee - banana and English toffee; Razmon - lemon and raspberry, and Strawberries and Cream.

She estimates she’s sold nearly 1,500 handcrafted cheesecakes. But she figures the number of people who have tasted her confections, including those who bought a slice or sampled a bite at events, is probably closer to 22,000

“It blows my mind that so many people have been able to have my cheesecake,” she said. “That makes me happy.”

Morales didn’t waste her third year in a pity party. She took more classes - 80 units in all - and worked 20 hours a week as a tutor to save money to spend the spring semester in Florence and then travel.

There were more life lessons. She found the classes disappointing. Instead of ancient history or art history or Italian language, something inspired by one of the most culturally rich cities in the world, she found herself consigned to studying English and American history, which she had already taken as an advance placement class in high school - while in Florence. And there was a bad roommate who stiffed her for $200 in bills. But she traveled extensively, as far as Ireland, Spain and Portugal and is now back in Sonoma County after five months. Never idle, she is busy doing a volunteer mural project at a formerly graffiti-scarred fence in Gibbs Park.

Morales also discovered, with dismay, that transferring as a junior was harder than she thought. All of her other preferred schools - UCLA, USC, Northwestern - turned her down.

But realistically, all she needed was one, and it was the school she had set her sights on back as a 12-year-old in her UC Berkeley sweatpants.

She will be the first in her family to go to college. Her parents were still teenagers when she was born. Dad Tomas works for the county, maintaining roads, and her mother Laura works at Bella Winery.

Growing up biracial, she said, left her feeling like she didn’t quite fit in, either as an Anglo or a Latina.

She’s hoping to continue baking cheesecakes while at Berkeley. But she’s changed her business profile to focus on personal orders, perhaps building up a clientele among local restaurants and selling snacks by the slice to fellow Bears, for whom an entire $40 cheesecake is not a budget priority.

“I also want to expand to restaurants in the Bay Area, and more specifically cater my cheesecakes to businesses who are hosting events, and parties, or sending gifts to clients. In the midst of all this I will be working on the transformation of College Confectionista into a nonprofit to assist young women with their dreams of pursuing a higher education,” said the young entrepreneur. “I mainly want to focus on helping Latina and minority women in the Sonoma County and the Bay Area community. The bigger goal is to have College Confectionista be a nationwide nonprofit assisting young women from every state.”

Business seems to be in her blood. Starting in kindergarten she had her own lemonade stand at the Healdsburg parade. By 9 she’d launched her own greeting card business, using birthday money to buy cardstock. She would sell them door to door. At 10, she hit the Plaza for Tuesday night concerts, offering to do women’s toenails, targeting her customers after they had consumed a few glasses of wine.

Morales’ signature style is the lighthearted old-school fun she brings to her marketing. She secretly feels like a girl out of her time. She loves all things 1950s. But if she could pick one year to plant herself, she figures 1975 might be about right.

“My favorite car of all time is a 1956 Chevy Bel Air,” she said.

Success in business, she maintains, is really a display of character, personality, grit and tenacity. But the business of business itself, could stand for a little lightening up.

“I love that anyone from anywhere can be fulfilled through business, and that business does not have to be associated with seriousness. I think the word business has this stiffness connected to it, but even a lemonade stand is a business to me.”