Tara Coley of Bright and Early Bakery Is Proving Vegan Desserts Wrong

When Tara Coley was seven years old, she wrote herself a note. She told every teacher she had that she would make their wedding cake one day. Nobody in her family cooked or baked. There were no obvious examples, no clear path. Just something she knew. There's a kind of wisdom in that: children haven't yet learned to talk themselves out of the things they want most. Before the world starts narrowing your options, you already know who you are. Tara just needed to find the note.

She found it more than a decade later, stuffed in a notebook she pulled out of her closet. She'd already dropped out of college after one semester. Her dad had given her a choice: find a full-time job or go back to school. The full-time job on the table was custodian at Regal movie theaters. "I said, I'm not doing that full-time." So she cleaned out her closet instead.

"I scribbled to myself at the age of seven in this notebook, I want to be a pastry chef. And I was like, wait, if I wrote that, that still has to mean something now." That night, she looked up pastry schools. Found one that was a year long and applied. "The rest was history."