Meet Shynna from Big City Little Baker!

Hi! I’m Shynna and I am so excited that you stopped by our kitchen!

Big City Little Baker is the place to find Biblical encouragement, learn traditional culinary skills and discover amazing, from scratch recipes!

My incredible husband, Martin and I live in the beautiful city of Los Angeles. Our little girl loves to be Mama’s Little Sous Chef. She is often my special guest in the kitchen!

I am a Cali girl all the way! I grew up in a beach town, where great Mexican food and In-N-Out Burger were a staple in my youth. For college, I went to the University of Oregon (Sco Ducks!) and moved to the Big Apple afterwards to pursue dance.

I always knew LA was my home and eventually God lead me back to California. I continued to pursue my dream of becoming a professional dancer in LA. My life long dream came true when I became a dancer for the NBA. The Lord blessed me with the opportunity to dance with the Los Angeles Lakers! As a professional dancer, healthy eating was always of high importance to me. I always enjoyed eating healthy meals that fueled my body for long days filled with cheering on the Lakers. At the time, eating healthy meant not eating fast food. But I would still buy frozen foods or convent foods from the grocery store.

It wasn’t until years later, when I was pregnant with our daughter, that I really took a deep dive into looking at all the ingredients and chemicals that are in our foods.

To be honest, my husband started me on this journey. He is so sweet and truly wanted to make sure that the baby and I were getting the best nutrients and the cleanest ingredients. I was honestly shocked to learn what is really going into our food. At first, I just started playing around with making our own yeast breads, then I started making our sourdough breads from my own starter. This lead to learning how to preserve our own food through the lost skill of Water Bath Canning, Pressure Canning, Fermenting and Dehydration.

When I first started, I was just making bread for fun. I have always loved baking and thoroughly enjoy creating something out of nothing. I was intrigued by the idea of creating a starter. The idea of having and sustaining a living culture of wild yeast was fascinating to me. Then I started to realize just how much money we could save if I made food from scratch. This led to discovering the traditional skill of home food preservation. Being able to can our own food and shop our pantry has beens a tremendous blessing.

Home made food is far superior than anything that you could buy from the store. Not only does homemade food taste way better, but it is also better for you! I absolutely love knowing exactly what is in our food.

The Lord has truly blessed us along this journey. Our prayer is to be used by Him to share what we have learned along the way. We pray that the Lord will use this blog to be an encouragement to you and that you would be inspired to create delicious homemade meals for your family!