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.”
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