Her story

A kitchen carried across the world

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.

I moved to Recife to study 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.

Now we are in the Netherlands, in Wassenaar. A new country, a new chapter — and the same recipes, the same hands, the same love that has followed me from Aracaju to Recife to São Paulo to Kyiv to Ho Chi Minh City to Mumbai to Shanghai and now here. Every product I make carries that journey with it.