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Graceful entry

Clint Holton P. Potestas experiences a taste of heaven on Earth.

Something good really came out from the oven.

Growing up in a busy kitchen, she has inevitably inherited the guts to measure sweetness. And now that she has found her niche in the kitchen, she can have her cake and eat it, too.

A fresh smell in the air evoked an all-time favorite in the oven: a tray of freshly baked cakes and muffins. They were life’s simple pleasures that delighted Rubina Alexis T. Lim as a child.

Her mom Annabelle used to bake pastries before her five children would arrive from school. But among her siblings, Rubina was the one who inherited her mother’s passion..

“During the time when my only thoughts were about running around and scraping my knees, my mom was always baking or cooking something every time we came home.”

“She actually just made me read the recipe books and allowed me to experiment with them. But I watched her bake a lot so I pretty much got the hang of it right away,” recalls the 21-year-old damsel.

After finishing her degree of Bachelor of Science in Nursing at Cebu Doctor’s University, she immediately became the auxiliary baker at Heavenly Grace Cakes and Pastries, a business their family has owned since 2004.

According to her, the most challenging in starting the family business was introducing their pastries to the market. If taken figuratively, their walnut caramel tart would have been the family’s magic bullet. It became their trademark as a pastry shop until Annabelle decided to include bread, cookies, muffins, and cakes.

“Our walnut caramel tart is my favorite recipe. It also started our business, and the smell of it fresh from the oven always reminds me of my childhood days,” she shares.

Despite the countless years of baking experience, one has remained to be unforgettable: “My friends and I were trying to raise money for our family fair when we were in our elementary days. And we made a whole batch of M& M’s cookies; I was the master of the kitchen, of course. It took us the entire day to finish. Then, we went around the village, trying to sell the cookies. But in the end, we didn’t even sell one.”

Aside from her desire to pass the nursing licensure examination and to finish a master’s degree, she confirms that expanding the family bakeshop is a top priority. Hence, it is also experimenting different angles of her craft.

For customers, it is the taste that makes these pastries “heavenly.” But for Rubina, the grace from heaven is the chance to be a blessing to everyone.

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