Home

Steamboat Springs — Caterer and pastry chef Nicolette Powell learned to cook to nurture a creative instinct and to eat something other than lettuce.

"I've been a vegetarian since I was 13 years old, and I grew up in the South - so there was not a lot to eat," Powell said. Opportunities to visit several countries while she was growing up introduced Powell to new and interesting spices and flavors, and she developed her hobby and passion for cooking from there.

That background, along with steady culinary and baking experiments, recently brought Powell around to cooking as a career move after years in the criminal justice field. She's scheduled to teach two cake design classes this fall at Steamboat Arts & Crafts Gym and will take up residence at Amante Coffee's kitchen Wednesday.

Workshops to decorate a "doll cake" - a cupcake that's topped with a small plastic doll and iced to look like a ball gown - are from 10 a.m. to noon today and 3 to 5 p.m. Oct. 17 at Steamboat Arts & Crafts Gym. Powell hopes to continue teaching at the Arts & Crafts Gym, with potential workshops including a holiday session about how to make gingerbread houses, she said.

Powell figures most of her structured practice in cooking comes from her time as a baker at Off the Beaten Path Bookstore. She gets recipe ideas from Ithaca, N.Y.'s Moosewood Restaurant and its extensive output of cookbooks, and she makes things up on her own.

During her 17 years in Steamboat, Powell has used a degree in criminal justice in her work as a caseworker. When she takes time off from her criminal justice work, Powell cooks, using what she learned earning a bachelor's degree in visual arts to guide her need to create. This winter, she took a seasonal job as a private chef.

"At the end of the season I thought, I'm just going to try this on my own and see what happens," Powell said.

For the past several months, Powell has run a catering and cake decorating business called Creative Cuisine out of rented space in a commercial kitchen. On Wednesday, she moves her base of operations to Amante Coffee in Wildhorse Marketplace, where she'll trade sweet and savory creations for kitchen space, she said.

Powell will make most of the coffee shop's breakfast foods, including scones and breakfast sandwiches; calzones for lunch and dinner; and sweets for Amante's counter at Bud Werner Memorial Library, said Amante owner Brent Langevin. Powell also will use the kitchen for her own projects, he said. Langevin met Powell through an event she was catering at the library, he said; Amante provided coffee for the event.

The cost for today's cake design workshop at Steamboat Arts & Crafts Gym is $25 with a $20 materials fee. To learn more about Powell's Creative Cuisine catering business, call her at 846-1135.