When I was a kid, I lived in a divided family.  First, my parents divorced. Second, one parent loved butter on everything and the other loved margarine.  I lived with my mother, the margarine mama. If there was butter in the fridge, it inevitably had a taste that mimicked the smell of the fridge. Ick!

One day I decided to make some popcorn and melt butter on it.  The butter smelled funny so I decided to use margarine. This was a terrible mistake.  The margarine had melted into oil and the popcorn had turned a wet greasy mess.  From that day on, I vowed to only use butter in any food I cooked or baked.

And baked I did!  I baked for every track meet, every soccer game, every party.  I began to build a reputation for yummy baked goods.

Butter in my mother’s house had become a precious commodity.  In order to avoid that “funny” taste, I carefully placed the wax paper wrapped sticks of joy in airtight baggies to protect them.  As a result of this careful attention to my butter, my step dad assumed I ate a lot of it and started calling me the “Cholesterol Queen”. I didn’t actually eat that much of it (not that I remember) but the name stuck.

When I started brainstorming names for the bakery, one thing I knew was that butter had to be in the name.  It is the most important ingredient in any bakery treat!  Eggs, flour, spices, sugar, vanilla can all be substituted for a something else but BUTTER is essential.  And since I am the “Cholesterol Queen” then, I thought, I could also be called the ButterGirl.

People liked the name. I became the ButterGirl and a bakery was born. Yeah!