Kae Gott is a senior at Western Albemarle High School where she leads the club Baking a Difference.
In her free time, Gott enjoys baking and drawing. While she has always loved to create art, she began to take her art more seriously during her freshman year of high school. Last year Gott took AP Art, and this year she’s taking PVCC Drawing. While she prefers using pencil and paper, she also paints. Her art, along with the art of four other students, was shown in Mudhouse Coffee Roasters this February. Her art teacher of the past three years, Adam Reinhard, picked five students’ work to display in an exhibition in Mudhouse.
“I would say that I do most kinds of [art]: drawing, painting, and I use markers and graphite, but my favorite is just pencil, paper, graphic, black and white drawing [with] charcoal,” Gott said.
Gott loves to bake and is a co-president of the Baking A Difference club at WAHS. The other co-presidents are Angelina Gao and Lindsey Corbeil. Baking A Difference aims to raise money for charity through bake sales. She enjoys baking almost anything, but last year, she was diagnosed with celiac disease which has made baking a lot more difficult.
“I still can make macarons now because they don’t have any gluten in them. I really like making macarons. I like making and decorating cakes… I’m not picky about what I make,” Gott said.
Q: How did you join Baking A Difference?
A: “So in my sophomore year, I think that I was at, like, the club poster making event in the beginning of the year. I think that was at that with a couple of friends, for no particular reason, and one of my friends was helping out a senior…with a poster, and she was like, ‘Oh, you should become a co-leader with us’. So, I became a co-leader of Baking A Difference in sophomore year… And we brought in another one of my friends. And then we just kept going.”
Q: How do you feel Baking A Difference impacts the community?
A: “Since the beginning, the goals have been to donate money to charities or help those who need it. We’ve done so through bake sales and participating in the Western fundraisers by selling baked goods. And I think that definitely in the first two years we’ve done a better job. It’s been hard to keep participation in numbers. So, a lot of the time it ends up that the three of us just do the baking.”
Q: When did you learn that you had celiac disease?
A: “Last year, right before winter break. So I think December 18th. Um, I had had it for a year beforehand, and my pediatrician kind of convinced me that I didn’t have it, but she tested me, like, just to be sure. And then it came back overwhelmingly positive, like, ‘you have celiac disease 52 times what a normal celiac person would have.’ So, yeah, it’s been rough, but my health has definitely improved over the past year, and I was anemic for, like, 5 years, and it got worse because of celiac, but I just got labs back, like, 2 days ago, the anemia is gone.”
Q: How has your celiac disease affected your baking?
A: “So, before my celiac disease, I was really into baking. And I bake a lot and I would say that I was pretty good at baking, and like I would make pastries and all that stuff. Um, and it’s definitely been a hard adjustment because having gluten in baked goods is like the protein that binds stuff together and makes it actually good. Um, so without gluten, substituting has led to some kind of not good results, but I have found a couple of things that I can bake successfully. And it’s been a slow journey, and it kind of feels like I’m learning how to bake all over again in a much more science-based manner instead of just being able to go like by eye, but [I’m] working through it.”
