I am Anne Byrn, the New York Times best-selling cookbook author who has inspired millions of Americans to bake cake. I baked my first cake – devil’s food – standing on my tip-toes in my mother’s 1960s Nashville kitchen. As a teenager I became our family’s designated birthday cake baker and after college would go on to write about every cake imaginable as food editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for many years. On sabbatical from the paper, I baked cakes in Paris at La Varenne Ecole de Cuisine in Paris. And coming home, I researched American flours, comparing which brands had the lowest protein and gluten contents and made the lightest cakes. When living briefly in England, I had American flour shipped to my doorstep so I could bake my new friends the American cake they loved best – brownies.
A decade later, in the midst of raising a busy family, I reached for a cake mix and wrote an article and then a best-selling book called The Cake Mix Doctor (Workman, 1999). It was a break-out hit, instructing readers to skip the box directions, following mine instead. Traveling the country on book tours with this book and others, I searched for great American regional cakes. And when home I baked those cakes in my kitchen, blogged about them, and through my website and newsletter have fielded thousands of reader-questions about cake baking. My books have nearly 4 million copies in print. In 2010, I launched a supermarket line of my own cake mixes, with no artificial ingredients.
A few other details – I am a graduate of the University of Georgia, receiving the university’s Emily Quinn Pou Professional Achievement Award in 2003. I was food editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for 15 years. I have been featured in People magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Southern Living, Publishers Weekly and many other publications. I have appeared on Good Morning America, Later Today, CNN, The Food Network and QVC, and I have taught cooking classes across the country. But when I am home in Nashville, TN, I enjoy gardening, playing tennis, hanging out with my family and British Labs, and restoring our old stone house, which was built by my grandfather in 1928.