My research for this article has been great. Basically, it involves driving over to the bakery Cakelove, buying a piece of New German Chocolate cake, then eating it. It's moist, not too sweet, with a kind of coffee icing with coconut flakes. Individually, chocolate, coffee, and coconut are all good flavors; but when you put them together - it's just delicious.

Cakelove is owned by Warren Brown.  It's a third act for the forty year old, who left a short career in law in 2000 to pursue his newly found passion, baking.  Brown started his professional life in 1993 as a health educator teaching reproductive health in Providence, Rhode Island and later in Los Angeles, California. His dedication to his career led him to law school with the hope of creating change in reproductive health education in America. "What I wanted was credentials so I could go before school boards and PTA's and say, hey listen, let's arm our kids with the information they really are looking for," he states.

He passed the bar in 1998 but found it impossible to secure a position as an advocate for reproductive health. He did get a job with the Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. There, he litigated against fraudulent health care providers and hospitals - important work, but not what he was hoping to do. "I began looking for something else that I could distract myself with, whether it was just a hobby or a different line of work pretty fast."

As a new year's resolution in 1999, Brown decided he would learn to bake. He had cooked in his spare time for friends, but baking was different. "I always wanted to get to that point where I could bake freestyle, in the same way I could cook freestyle without having to worry about measuring and stuff like that," he says. He discovered the book The Art of the Cake by Bruce Healy and Paul Bugat. By his own admission, he just couldn't stop reading it. "That was the first book that kind of unlocked some of the mysteries of baking," he says.
 
Brown started making cakes for friends. "It was a hobby at that point and I was just kind of baking for fun, you know, making a cake for a friend's birthday here and there." But as word got out, people started to offer to pay for his creations. "I didn't really start selling cakes until early in 2000," he remembers,  "The first cake I made for someone I didn't know was for Valentine's Day 2000… By that March and April I was getting calls from people who I'd never met before who had heard about me," he recalls.

By the spring of 2000 Brown was thinking that maybe he could do something with this. At that point he was working in his law practice during the day and baking at home at night. He was working so hard at both jobs, that at one point he had to go to the emergency room for exhaustion. "I pushed myself too hard," he recalls, "I would try to get home by six, and my rule was to try to get something into the oven within twenty minutes, which is like insane."

Doing both jobs had to end. Around the summer of 2000, Brown realized that baking was the only job he wanted to do. In October, he left the law profession. The reaction from colleagues was mixed. "Some people were shocked, some people didn't understand it, many were supportive. Looking back, it did happen kind of quickly," he admits.

Baking cakes for a living and business, however, were two different things. "From 2000 to 2002, that's where all the grit is, in that two year period," he laughs, "I thought I could get out of my job and into a retail space within a couple of months. I was woefully wrong."

He found a commercial kitchen space that he could share; but then two things happened: one is that he started running out of money; the other was he was a little lost. "The idea of opening a business is a lot different than the reality of 'OK here's how you go about to do it all,'"  he says. That reality of trying to bake and open a store was crushing for Brown. "It's just a lot to do," he recounts,  "In my eagerness to break out on my own, I just overlooked a lot of that."

He supported himself during the beginnings of Cakelove by taking a steady flow of cake orders. It was enough to get by. "I made some dollars; put a little to opening up a new shop. I was making less money, but not tremendously less,"  he says.

Then he got his break. Brown just happened to run into Washington Post food writer Judith Weinraub at a store. They chatted and exchanged cards. That led to an article in the post titled 'Warren Brown Leaves Law To Bake Cakes.'  "It was the best thing that ever happened because it was the break of my life,"  Brown recalls, "It led to a lot more business and a lot more media coverage. It brought me the new store that I opened up."

Today, there are seven Cakelove stores across the DC area. Brown has a passion for the art of cake baking that's infectious. "A lot of people tell me that Cakelove is inspiring to them," he explains. He finds that he gets a lot of people who want to be a part of his business. "It brings me people who are excited about cakes and just the business that I started and they wanted to be part of that," he says.

Cakelove has also created success for Brown in other ways. He's been featured on the Oprah Winfrey show, the Today Show, as well as in ads for American Express and Dell Computers. He is also the author of two cookbooks on baking and was the host of the Food Network's "Sugar Rush."

Ultimately, he finds his success didn't come from a desire to make a lot of money. Rather, it was his desire to find his passion. His advice to potential entrepreneurs is, "You gotta find what it is and put your heart into it and not to hold back. Focus, concentrate and do it hard now. Because you can be rewarded greatly, but that reward is your own emotional satisfaction."