About Vintage Baked Modern

About my professional experience…

Hi, I’m Apryl, founder of Vintage Baked Modern, an all-natural specialty baking company in Northwest Indiana. For over 12+ years, I’ve owned and operated a professional bakery, developing and selling natural, innovative snacks like Harvest Superfood Balls and granola. These products were sold in grocery stores like Whole Foods Market, Fresh Thyme Market, Beatrix Restaurants, and Parkhurst Dining food service. In 2019, I re-branded my company to Vintage Baked Modern, adding premium gluten-free baked goods and baking mixes using my own blend of gluten-free flour to my list of wholesale products. During this time I created many versitle recipes to make from just using one gluten-free mix.

During the pandemic, I was also the gluten-free/vegan chef for Parkhurst Dining at Valparaiso University and Carthage College which lead into an expansion of commercial baking of cookies, cakes, etc. I trained staff how to use my gluten-free flour and baking mixes to scale up their gluten-free baked goods for their students.

I still make and wholesale grab-n-go Harvest Superfood Balls in an FDA-inspected, commercial kitchen. They are sold in university and local coffee cafes and micro-markets in Chicago. More info here Harvest Superfood Balls.

About my blog…

In the midst of the pandemic in 2020 I started my blog Vintage Baked Modern™ with the intent to use my professional baking experience to teach home bakers how to convert and modernize vintage recipes with today’s methods, tools, and natural ingredients.

All of my recipes use premium natural, simple ingredients which really make a difference when recreating “old-fashioned” to yield the most authentic “taste.” So come take a bite into the simple tastes of yesteryear!

The blog will show you how to take a unique, lost vintage recipe and break down the steps using modern methods such as decorating skills to make baking easier; provide modern tools to show you how to take make recipes faster; teach you how to swap out ingredients (like oleo) for a modern substitute like butter; OR convert a recipe to meet today’s specialty dietary restrictions, like making it wholesome, gluten-free, or vegan.

About my roots…

I’ve always had an intuition on how bake, passed down from my great-grandmother in West Virginia. She was a member the Ladies Aid Society and 4-H, and would volunteer to go into other women’s homes to teach them basic skills like baking, cooking, preserving food, etc. I’ve been baking since I was a child in my Nan’s kitchen. I remember the sights, the smells, and watching her turn flour into the most delicious, comforting baked goods. Most of our baking time together was making favorite family holiday foods or after picking fresh fruit from an orchard.

I was raised on whole foods, that were healthy, wholesome, whole-grain, and refined-sugar free, before they trendy. My mom was part of a local food co-op and a La Leche group where she learned how to use real ingredients to make well-balanced meals, healthy snacks, low-sugar baked goods, wholesome homemade bread and preserved foods from the garden. Almost all of our meals were all from scratch, as going out to eat was saved for special occasions.

Embracing these all-natural lifestyle principals has always been a way of life for me, my business, in raising my own family, so now I “lean into” this natural gift to share with others.

I’m always up for a test recipe challenge, so reach out to me at [email protected] and ask “how do I swap out an ingredient from my grandma’s recipe?” or “how can I re-create a cool retro recipe?”