The smell of warm, freshly baked cookies floods the kitchen as Paly junior Aaron Shone pulls his baking sheet from the oven. With ingredients scattered along the counter and pans sitting in the sink, it’s clear that Shone is well accustomed to working in the kitchen. Out from the oven comes vibrant green cookies, perfectly shaped and spaced out. As Shone sets his signature matcha cookie onto his dark, granite countertop to cool, he swiftly reorganizes the kitchen and prepares to plate his cookies.

Shone’s passion for baking began when the world went into a global lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Although Shone had previously prepared food for himself when his parents were away or as a bare necessity, his attitude towards cooking changed when he started making food during the pandemic. Instead of viewing it as a chore, something else seemed to flip a mental switch.

“What was different that [first] time [during the pandemic] was that I was experimenting and baking because I enjoyed it,” Shone said.

Like many other Paly students in 2020, he found himself with an abundance of extra time on his hands. Shone took this as an opportunity to develop a new skill; he picked up his bowl and spatula and started baking, and from then he hasn’t stopped.

“I chose baking because even before I really had a passion for it, I felt that I was pretty good at baking. … it is something tangible and something that I can share with more people,” Shone said. “With baking, it’s something that you can eat, you can share with people and you can make in large amounts.”

Along with this, Shone saw baking as a way to use his creativity and express himself in a new  way. After spending his school days immersed in STEM subjects and studying for tests, baking offers a break.

“Baking is an art, and I wanted to do something that was different from what I did at school, [which mainly] focused on math and science,” Shone said.

As an experienced baker, Shone finds baking as a great way to de-stress from school.

“Sometimes I need to use my brain because there’s math involved, like if I’m scaling up or down a recipe,” Shone said. “If I’m making a recipe that I’ve made fifty times before, like matcha cookies, then I can turn my brain off and just go on autopilot.”

Shone discovered baking can be therapeutic and relaxing. In times of uncertainty, whipping together ingredients and making a few sweet treats gives Shone a helping hand to navigate through his life.

“It’s a stress reliever because school is really tough … and it’s something to do that keeps me from breaking down,” Shone said. “Baking is kind of my outlet.”

However, Shone started out fairly uncertain about his skills.

“When I started baking, I really wanted to replicate the recipes exactly,” Shone said. “I wanted my things to look exactly the way they did in videos I saw.”

As Shone learns to be more freehanded and intuitive with his recipes, he has grown a lot.

“Recently, I’ve taken more creative liberties when it comes to things I bake,” Shone said. “It’s really important to evolve because you can’t always do one thing a certain way and expect to grow.”

After tossing himself into this new hobby, Shone’s fridge quickly filled with a lot more pastries than his family could handle. With such an overflow of food, Shone and his parents had to find solutions to clear out their kitchen.

“When I really got into baking a lot, we had too many things in the house … so she started giving them away to her friends,” Shone said. “Then it evolved into me giving [my baked goods] away … and my friends asking me to make stuff that they wanted.”

Although Shone hadn’t intended to start making custom orders, he realized he loved this new opportunity to have a positive impact on others.

“Not only did I enjoy baking, [but] I also enjoyed seeing my friends be happy eating my food,” Shone said.

By 2021, Shone would often drop off baked goods for his friends or bring them to school as people transitioned back into in-person learning to spread some joy amidst uncertain times. His growing expertise with baking has also opened up a world of opportunity to start baking customized recipes for his friends’ parties, events and more.

Paly junior Arabella Guinle has been a customer of Shone since the beginning of his career back in 2021, and has continued to order from him.

“The first time he baked for me was in middle school, when he made some banana pudding for my birthday,” Guinle said. “That was when he first started getting into baking.”

These initial connections have proved to be long lasting partnerships, as Guinle has continued to ask him to bake goods over the years. For her sweet sixteen in August 2024, she asked Shone to make him a pink raspberry-flavored cake.

“I really like getting him to do all my birthday cakes, because he makes it very personalized,” Guinle said. “You can ask him to do specific things and it always turns out really good.”

Ranging from lemon cakes with raspberries to banana pudding, Shone is always open to baking treats for his loved ones. The finished product never fails to amaze his customers, and while their praise and this newfound job provided Shone with a sense of fulfillment, it has also kept him consistent and committed to baking throughout the years.

“I like seeing the cake at the end product, handing it off to my friends and family and just seeing the smiles on their faces,” Shone said.

Furthermore, he often takes inspiration from the Pinterest photos that friends will send him as a reference, and improvises a recipe from that for custom orders.

“Some things my friends want are things that I don’t have a recipe for, so I try something [new] and see if it works,” Shone said.

Life has inevitably gotten more stressful as he’s grown from an amateur chef in seventh grade to an experienced chef as a high school junior, which stirs up periodic creative blocks or a general lack of motivation.

“It [baking] oscillates since sometimes I just don’t have the motivation because of the schoolwork and the stress of extracurriculars,” Shone said.

However, stress and time crunches have never had an effect on his genuine love and raw passion towards baking.

“Once I’m on break, I get motivated to bake again,” Shone said. “People get burnt out, but then they find their passion again. That’s the same case that I have [experienced].”

Looking towards the future, Shone knows there are many different possibilities regarding where he could take this passion. However, Shone is more motivated by the joy that comes with his baked goods over his profits when making custom orders.

“Sometimes I make money for it, but [ultimately] I like sharing my creations with friends, even if I don’t get paid,” Shone said.

Although Shone often finds himself juggling many different, demanding aspects of his life, he never feels like he has to sacrifice baking. At the end of the day, baking will always be the creative outlet he turns to as a way to decompress.

“I don’t have to be a professional baker or a chef in order to pursue this passion,” Shone said. “It [baking] might   not be what my future job will be, but it still is something that I hope to do in my free time and also take into my future.”