In the city I took classes at the Institute for Culinary Education and the Artisan Baking Center in Long Island City. Then I began to look further afield to study and found King Arthur Flour in Norwich, Vermont, and a treasure trove of year-round professional bread and pastry classes. I signed up for a multiday class, Survey of French Breads, which I could attend, and, with the guilt of a parent who knows full well the amount of work the other half is in for (and knowing that I might get an uninterrupted night of sleep!), I packed a few things and said my good-byes. When I drove north out of Manhattan, my shoulders dropped and my breath slowed as I crossed bridges. I saw the balance of color shift back to green trees; towering buildings turned to natural canyons; and traffic lights were swapped for the glimmer of the Hudson River. Vermont is my home state of sorts; my father grew up in Northfield, where they bathed on Saturday nights, and snow piles covered first-floor windows in winter. In spring, wood-fired sugaring was possible only with the help of farm horses. I arrived late in the day, blinded by the darkness of this rural place with no streetlights to shine over a city that actually sleeps.

Class began after I gorged on coffee and the best pastries I had ever eaten, and I could have levitated with the excitement of all that surrounded me after a decent night of sleep. We were quickly into our first day, mixing, folding, and dividing a French sourdough called pain au levain. There were two instructors. One was the chef and baker James McGuire, who translated and adapted one of the most important books on artisan baking ever written, Taste of Bread, by the French master Raymond Calvel. And co-teaching was a guy I had never heard of, Jeffrey Hamelman, the director of the King Arthur Flour Bakery. As we divided the first dough, the pace picked up, Jeffrey modeling the quick, efficient movement of a professional with three decades of experience at the bench, and the rest of us fumbling to keep up. After the divided and preshaped dough relaxed in its circular form, Jeffrey set about shaping the blobs into bâtards. Have you seen juggling before? Have you stood close while multiples fly skyward with flicking motions and fall back to Earth only to continue skyward again? In a juggler’s movement are economy and beauty, the familiarity of ten thousand repetitions, the invisible adjustments that allow the motion to continue. Watching Jeffrey shape blew a fuse in me. Involuntarily, I stepped backward and leaned forward at the waist as my jaw dropped. . . . I cannot say others noticed, but I will never forget it. I saw the mastery. I saw passion, work, experience, and craft.

In this life that is all I hope to be: passionate, capable, and earnest. With practice and hopefully fewer than ten thousand repetitions you may make a beautiful pain au levain bâtard as well. Do not be discouraged if you throw skyward and hit the ceiling. Mastery takes time. This is how we learn.

Driving back to New York, I took country roads and meandering courses rather than interstates in order to prolong the trip in every way possible provided I still made it home to see my girls before bedtime. I returned to King Arthur for multiple classes, and in addition to the bags of baked goods I toted south at the end of each trip, I also took formulas and better skills, improving from poor to mediocre along the way. Baking was taking me somewhere, and I was a willing passenger.

Brioche is a miracle. How could mere flour support half its weight in both whole eggs and butter? How could it feel light as a feather and yet pack five million calories per serving? All right, maybe only a few hundred, but still, this shining chestnut-colored loaf with yolk-yellow crumb is a queen among baked goods. The brioche that Jeffrey taught became a steadfast favorite in our apartment building as neighbors learned my baking schedule. The basic dough is excellent when simply proofed, painted with egg wash, and baked—you will be amazed at the glorious sight as it is pulled from your oven. Or, as I did, you may take the brioche coffee cake, filled with pastry cream, topped with poached fruit and streusel, as a sign that you might have professional baking in your future. In either case, your mouth and neighbors will thank you.