Autumn Martin

Taking a year off after high school to figure out what she wanted to do, Autumn moved to Lake Tahoe to snowboard. She worked in a cafeteria and also as the hostess for the resort's fine dining restaurant. Drawn to the kitchen, she spent a lot of time watching the chefs.

Moving away from her original plan of going to art school to study sculpture, glass, and ceramics, she traveled a bit more and returned to Seattle and began working at Honey Bear Bakery as a barista. At the time, the bakery offered to pay 1/3 of the cost of culinary school for their employees. Autumn attended the Edmonds Community College Culinary Arts program starting in 2001, finishing the two-year program and graduating as Student of the Year. While there, she revived the Chef's Club, and built a garden, getting into organic farming.

She heard about a pastry lead job at Canlis, had three interviews and was hired. She stayed for two years. Along with other duties, she made specialty cakes decorated with beads she'd made. It was at Canlis that she discovered her love of working with chocolate.

She found out that Theo Chocolate needed someone and applied for the job. It was offered to her, but she felt it was too much responsibility and turned it down. They suggested she work a few days a week to see how it went and get them through Valentine's Day. She worked there part-time from January-June 2005, then officially accepted the full-time job. She hired and managed a team of eight in the confection kitchen, developed product, the culinary program, packaging, did events, and got into sales, selling chocolate to restaurants.

In September of 2008, she was part of a team doing an auction dinner on a farm and she created her now-famous molten chocolate cake in a Mason jar. Within two months, she was selling the cake at the Ballard Farmers Market. Both Theo and Picnic Food & Wine sold the cakes. Eventually, working at Theo full time and doing the farmers markets became too much.  She stopped doing the markets to concentrate on her wholesale clients.

Autumn resigned from Theo in June 2009 to do Hot Cakes full time. But first, she went to Spain for five months and worked on an organic farm. She returned in January 2010, helped a friend open a restaurant in Napa, then began working the Ballard Farmers Market in late February. She added products like her line of salted caramel sauces, cookies, milk chocolate malted cake, and fresh fruit pocket pies. She worked the markets for 1-1/2 years before putting a business plan together for Hot Cakes in the summer of 2011. The dessert shop/restaurant opened May 18, 2012, and she got her liquor license in July 2012.

In April 2013, her first book, Malts & Milkshakes, a milkshake cookbook, was published.

www.getyourhotcakes.com