“For me, food has always been a language: It’s a way that I could connect with other people and show love,” Umber Ahmad says while rolling ma’amoul cookie dough in her Dumbo kitchen. Outside, there’s a steady downpour of freezing rain. Inside, there’s a sense of effortlessly curated coziness: sage candles are lit and cashmere blankets strewn over couches, as soft jazz music plays in the background. The air smells like sugar, dates, and butter.
Ahmad didn’t follow a traditional path to becoming a baker. There was no culinary school, no stint at a Michelin-star restaurant. But growing up as a child of Pakistani immigrants in Marquette, Michigan, food was just always part of who she was: she’d bake with her mother and sister, as well as with her Finnish nanny “Gram.” (“She’d wrap me in blankets and put me up on the counter,” Ahmad remembers. “While she would be baking, she’d be telling me stories about her childhood or when she first got married or what it was like living on a farm.”)
During the summers, they spent two months in Pakistan with their extended family where something was always on the stove or in the oven. Then, in August, the Ahmads would spend the month in an entirely new country like Sweden or Spain. “The first thing that my parents would do is go and talk to all of the local shopkeepers and taxi drivers. They’d ask them where we should go and eat,” she explains. As an adult, she continued to retain that culinary curiosity and familiarity. Even though she worked the demanding hours of an investment banker—her specialty was in the global expansion of food products—she baked for every holiday, for every party, for every friend.
One day, one of her clients, the famed celebrity chef Tom Colicchio, heard about her hobby. He asked her if he could try some of her baked goods. “I spent three days making everything I knew how to make from biscuits, to cookies to cheesecakes, everything. At the end of that, he looked at my food, looked at me, and said: ‘What do you want to do with this?’”
Photographed by Fujio Emura