Prado gives up law for baking and ‘Baked in Vermont’

Imagine giving up a successful law career and running a production company to become a fulltime baker. You’d have to be pretty passionate about all things related to butter, flour and eggs to make a change so drastic.

But that’s exactly what Gesine Prado, host of the Saturday Food Network series “Baked in Vermont,” did to pursue what she gradually realized was her first love. And she hasn’t looked back.

“I’ve baked my entire life. There was not a moment that I didn’t bake,” Prado explains. “Like during college, during winter finals, I was making gingerbread houses instead of studying, and instead of studying for the bar, I baked. And I actually passed on the first go and I tried to convince people that baking was the key.

... And all those things should have been clues from the very beginning that my calling was, you know, everything other than what I was doing – it was the baking that was my calling.”

In each 30-minute episode of her midday series, Prado walks viewers through the various steps in preparing the recipes that she herself developed, be it a Charlotte Royale chocolate cake with homemade caramels, a chocolate yule log, a turkey pot pie or a hearty pork pie with a big green salad.

All episodes are filmed at her 18th century farmhouse in Hartford, Vt., which is attached to the cooking school she runs, Sugar Glider Kitchen. The sister of actress Sandra Bullock, she’s also an instructor for King Arthur Flour and Stonewall Kitchen, has written four baking cookbooks and a memoir and owned and operated a bakery in Montpelier, Vt.