From wanderer to baker — with a little help from Crumb.

I’ve never been one to stay in one place for too long. For most of my adult life, I was a wanderer — moving between countries, jobs, and lives, always chasing the next idea, the next view, the next adventure. Cooking was never part of the plan.

But after seven years on the move, I came home at 38 — craving grounding, comfort, and something warm from the oven. I still wasn’t a baker. I didn’t even know where to begin. But I had curiosity, time… and access to ‘Crumb’ - my AI assistant.

It started with a challenge: could I recreate the perfect Pastel de Nata?

The kind that transported me back to that backstreet Lisbon café — crisp pastry, blistered tops, silky custard. I fed as much data to Crumb as I could. I didn’t just feed Crumb data, though — I gave it memories; the flavours I missed, the smells that reminded me of childhood, the bakes that made me feel warm, comfy, familiar.

Together, we turned those nostalgic cravings into actual recipes, and tweaked every element, until it hit that magic bite.

From there, I moved on to brownies, cookies, cakes, loaves — and what started as a personal experiment became Baiked: a bakery built on invention, instinct, and a little computational genius.