Sweet Transformation
C
ara Linn didn’t start having health issues until she began working as a pastry chef. An Amarillo native who went to culinary school in Louisiana, Cara landed a coveted internship with Elisa Strauss, the proprietor of Confetti Cakes in New York City and a celebrity cake designer. Linn jumped at the opportunity and moved to NYC. She ended up living and working there for several years. The career opportunity was amazing, but she felt terrible. “I was baking all the time, tasting all the time, eating all the time,” she says. Her energy plummeted. She began developing skin problems like eczema and soon realized that her skin tended to flare up as she ate more sugary desserts. Determined to find a solution, she began a period of research and self-experimentation. Finally Linn pinpointed the culprit: processed white sugar. “That’s what made me feel so terrible. My blood sugar
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AMARILLO.COM/AMARILLO-MAGAZINE • FEBRUARY 2021
would spike – I’d get that sugar high – and then the crash,” she says. “I decided if [baking sweets] is what I’m going to do for a living, then I have to be able to eat what I’m making. So I started experimenting with organic sugar.” After the Strauss internship and stints at a number of NYC bakeries and restaurants, Linn ended up starting her own cake business in Brooklyn. Her experiments in the kitchen led her to less-processed sweeteners like organic cane sugar and agave nectar. Baking with those products instead of white table sugar almost immediately improved her skin, her energy levels and how she felt overall. “It made a huge difference,” she says. Today, Cara Linn is the new proprietor of Uptown Sweet Shoppe, a bakery located in the Summit Shopping Center at 34th and Coulter. She bought the business in November 2020 from former owner Betty Smith, who was ready to retire. Linn is focusing on introducing
PHOTOS BY STEPHANIE THOMPSON, COURTESY OF UPTOWN SWEET SHOPPE
What’s Cooking?
