EL SEGUNDO HERALD February 10, 2022 Page 11
Ashley Lathrop from front page
That doesn’t stop her from getting custom
requests for other baked goods outside
the box. Though small is her specialty, she
recently was commissioned to make a large
Tequila themed cake. “This tequila cake
was difficult. But I love the challenge, and
through her baking. Of course, she says, her
favorite part is making a customer happy, no
matter what their order, and it’s the positive
feedback that keeps her going.
Lathrop keeps up with industry standards
and trends largely through social media,
Lathrop took on the challenge of macarons to set her business apart.
Lathrop most recently made a tequila-themed cake for a
birthday party.
I’m so proud of what I accomplished with
it. It turned out beautifully, and the birthday
girl loved it,” she says. She has her eye on
cakes and decorated sugar cookies in the
future, though currently, she is only in the
researching phase, as these creations take
more time and a different kind of attention
to detail.
So how does she have time to fill orders,
work a full-time tech job, and be a mom?
“Working from home has its perks,” she
laughs. Lathrop uses baking as a creative
outlet from her more technical job, and
she’s able to multitask and bake while she
works. Though her kids don’t help with client
orders for sanitation and legal reasons,
they have expressed an interest in what she
does, and her youngest often participates in
family baking.
When asked about the possibility of expanding
her side business in the future, Lathrop
says she isn’t looking to expand too much
more, largely because one of her reasons
for baking is the community it builds. She
credits much of her business to the El Segundo
Mom Swap group on Facebook and
loves making new friends and connections
and her creations can be found year-round,
with her holiday cocoa bombs topping the
list in popularity. She is constantly on the
lookout for newer and sweeter recipes, and
she emphasizes that her treats taste as good
as they look! •
Travel from page 2
at Furnace Creek. With ground temperatures
that hit 200 degrees, the rain can evaporate
as quickly as it hits the ground. Not great for
water-skiing, but the perfect place to celebrate
National Fry an Egg on the Sidewalk Day
(yes, there is such a Thing, also known as
Independence Day).
But in our humble opinion, the name
given to this geographical wonder by those
exhausted 49ers might be a bad rap. No
one in the troupe who came up with the
hyperbolic moniker died of anything related
to sun or heat. For the obstinate travelers of
the 19th century, in fact, there were far more
hazardous crossings. The Great Salt Lake
Basin, the Humboldt Sink, and the Colorado
River above the Grand Canyon claimed the
lives of hundreds of professional soldiers and
adventurers—much less crusty muleskinners,
wagon-trained families, or starry-eyed tourists
in their station wagons. Of course you could,
and still can, die visiting places like Death
Valley, but these days, it requires a thoroughly
careless attitude to screw things up that badly.
At times, it feels like the evolution of
the modern American Southwest was as
much an advertising campaign and a con
game as a historical imperative. Think of
the Pasadena Rose Parade and San Diego’s
gorgeous Hotel Coronado, both designed to
peddle real estate to newspaper readers and
visitors from all over the globe. Most people
of an earlier generation learned about Death
Valley from the radio and TV show “Death
Valley Days”, that helped launch Ronald
Reagan’s political career and offloaded
metric tons of great-great-granny’s favorite
laundry soap, Twenty Mule Team Borax, or
its hand-scouring cousin, Boraxo.
The largest man-made structure in Death
Valley, Scotty’s Castle, still serves as an
appropriately picturesque monument to the
role of the con man—and maybe the selfless
benefactor—in the selling of the West. Walter
E. Scott spent a lifetime hawking shares in
non-existent gold claims to gullible Easterners.
Badwater: Picnic spot in an inferno. Get there early to beat the crowds.
In 1900, he quit Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
Show and married a woman he nicknamed
Jack. Together, they bilked investors out of
millions (or maybe thousands, this being a
tale of legendary exaggeration). The shenanigans
made Scotty famous and brought him
to the attention of one of the nicest men in
American history, Albert Mussey Johnson of
Oberlin, Ohio. Even after Scotty’s schemes
were exposed, Johnson financed Scotty, Jack,
and the kids, and even included rooms for
the aging swindler in his construction of
the Castle.
Yet for all the noisy human plunging through
the American Southwest into the modern age,
the most impressive and enduring feature of
Death Valley originated far earlier, when tectonic
forces shaped its quiet, eternal, and even
serene emptiness, especially at twilight and
dawn. For wannabe landscape photographers
like us, deserts provide the ultimate test of
technical and artistic skill. We can’t rely on
the gaudy architectural pretensions of Kings
and Sultans or the spiraling imaginations of
city planners in places like New York, Paris,
or Istanbul. The “perfect shot” doesn’t stare
us in the face like it does on a Swiss Alp
or in a Norwegian fjord, a quaint English
village, or a Cairo souk.
In any vast, monotone space like Death
Valley, you have to go back to the fundamentals
of proportion and perspective, light and
shadow, time of day, of creating—or rather
unleashing—tension and momentum by the
placement of your subject in the frame. And
this might all sound like technical mumbojumbo,
but spend a few hours googling
simple photographic concepts—”Negative
Space”, “Rule of Thirds”, or “Magic Hour”,
to name a few. Follow that up with a sojourn
in Death Valley, and the artistry of your
vacation slide show will earn you the envy
of all your neighbors.
Our vote for Ugliest (or most accurately
libeled) Place on Earth might well go to the
Dead Sea on the Israeli-Jordanian border. Over
millennia, the salts left by the evaporating
water have saturated the ancient landscape
with a hardscrabble, gray dreariness that
resists the most determined Photoshopper.
Hardly what you’d expect of an area the
western world has long called its Holy Land.
In America’s Death Valley, there are afternoons,
particularly in the summer, when the
heat and glare burn much of the landscape
into a colorless nightmare for the eyes. But
“Dead” or “Death”? Not really. Unless you
do something really foolish, like confusing
an abandoned mine shaft with the monkey
bars of your childhood. Or forgetting to notify
the Park Ranger station when you wander
off to somewhere you probably don’t belong.
Or forgetting to check the weather forecast
before crawling into a flash flood canyon. Or
running out of gas and water because it was
too hot to get out of the car. Or…
Maybe those early settlers should have
just named the place Manly Valley. But if
they had, would we still be writing about it?
Next up: War and Peace in Jutland.
Ben & Glinda Shipley, published writers
and photographers, share their expertise and
experience of their many world travels. If
you have any questions or interest in a particular
subject, please email them at web@
heraldpublications.com. •
Mesquite Flats: Lost footsteps on a trek to the fabled Star Dune. Artist’s Palette: Colorful dumplings left over from a catastrophic primordial stew.