Rolling fondant with the punches: Seal Beach nurse opens home bakery amid unexpected challenges
Seal Beach resident Christina Brody-Chafe loves being a nurse. But she had to spend more time at home after her husband, retired paramedic Steve Chafe, was diagnosed with a brain tumor in November 2018.
Her mother died the day her husband came home from surgery. Her father died about two weeks later.
When COVID-19 cases started breaking out in California in 2020, she had to go on hiatus from her chosen profession to avoid inadvertently spreading the virus to her family.
“I worked in the ER at St. Mary’s. I worked at the ER in [Los Alamitos]. I saw nurses dying, and we didn’t know anything about it.
“I’m kind of the glue [holding the family together],” she added. “So I thought, both boys were home, and if something happened to me.... I really wanted to go to work, but I realized if I go down...”
It wasn’t long before she began to miss the fast-paced setting of her job, and she became restless. So, like many during the pandemic, she turned to baking as an outlet.
She started out by making fondant topped cakes for neighbors and friends. She moved on to more refined recipes, and word of mouth began to spread. By 2021 she found herself taking orders from well outside of Seal Beach.
“At first I thought people were buying my cookies because they felt bad for me or something,” Brody-Chafe said. “But they were driving in from San Diego or Ventura. And I thought ‘Well, they’re passing a lot of other cookies on the way here.’”
Now she spends two to three days working at either Sea Surgery Center in Seal Beach or Memorial Outpatient Surgery Center in Long Beach. She spends the rest of the week running her baking business while serving as a driver for Steve and helping him care for his parents, who live a few streets over.
Brody-Chafe gets a lot of help from the friends she had started baking for in the first place. In addition to sending her referrals, neighbors sometimes gather in assembly line fashion to package larger orders or assist her husband with taste-testing duties.
The cakes, cookies, hot cocoa bombs and other sweets from Brody-Chafe’s home bakery are more expensive than what you might order from a more traditional business. She said that’s because she works closely with each client to create personalized treats that are pleasing to look at and eat.
But her most memorable creations were given out for free. She has given cakes to the daughter of a co-worker who had undergone a lung transplant and a young boy who was once treated by her husband for a seizure. She said she had anonymously left baked goods on the doorstep of a Long Beach Fire captain whose son been diagnosed with cancer.
She said she loves including intricate details in her work to bring her clients’ vision to life, and her favorite projects are the ones that allow her to exercise creativity. She seeks out courses to pick up new techniques, and feels like she’s still learning how to run and promote a business.
“I was in my bedroom for 10 days because we thought I had COVID, and that’s how I wound up with a website,” Brody-Chafe said.
She said running her bakery has been more challenging than being a nurse in many ways. And working at a hospital full time would likely pay better.
But having her own business affords her the freedom to spend more time on other priorities in her life. And it’s an exciting new challenge that allows her to flex her creativity while making people happy.
“I never intended to have a business, ever,” Brody-Chafe said. “I feel like it’s a wave I’m trying to catch, you know? I’m chasing after this business. It’s moving faster than me.”
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