Her story

A kitchen that finally came home

My name is Cecilia. I was born in Aracaju, in the northeast of Brazil — a place where food is inseparable from warmth, family, and Sunday afternoons that seem to last forever. Pão de queijo was always there. So were the cakes I learned to bake almost before I learned anything else.

At the age of 12, I moved to Recife to study. I later studied economics at UFPE, where I met Ronaldo. We got married and began a life together that would take us — as his work demanded and our curiosity allowed — to every corner of Brazil first: a year in Brasília, a year in Ourinhos, and then three years in São Paulo. It was in São Paulo that our daughter Letícia was born, and where I fell deeper in love with baking. I attended cake courses, and began studying Gastronomy at SENAC Santo Amaro. The kitchen was becoming more than a room. It was becoming my vocation.

Then came Kyiv. We moved to Ukraine, where our son Matheus was born. I began teaching culinary lessons at the Kyiv Women's Club — sharing Brazilian recipes with women from all over the world, and discovering how food becomes a common language when everything else is foreign. It was one of the most formative experiences of my life.

From Kyiv we moved to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where I threw myself into volunteer work. And then to Mumbai, India — where I continued volunteering, this time providing power nutritional bars for malnourished children. Feeding people, it turned out, was always what I was meant to do.

We returned to São Paulo for a year and a half, and during that time something shifted. I started selling my cakes — to friends, and then to friends of friends, and then to people I had never met. Word spread quietly, as it always does when something is made with genuine care. That was when I understood: this was not a hobby. This was a business.

Shanghai came next. I took that understanding seriously and opened an official company — with the red stamp, as they say — and set up a proper kitchen in the basement of our family home. CeciMade, in all but name, had already begun.

Wassenaar is where the boxes stayed unpacked. CeciMade isn't a taste of somewhere far away. It's my home kitchen, open to my neighbours.

Brazilian recipe, made with love in Wassenaar.