Deirdre Feeley reflects on how her time in Davis ultimately led to Driftwood Baking

UC Davis alumna Deirdre Feeley wanted to be a pastry chef growing up, but like many people, pastry became more of a hobby as she grew older and her interest in plant science took precedence as a possible career path. However, during her time at UC Davis, her passion for pastry resurfaced, and she now operates her own micro-bakery in North Oakland, Driftwood Baking. Feeley attributes much of the success of Driftwood to her undergraduate experiences at UC Davis. 

During her time at Davis, Feeley lived in the co-operative Turtle House, where two of her roommates began an “underground supper club” in 2016. Feeley joined the club — called “Tortuga” — as the pastry chef when they were getting started and mostly cooking for friends, but she said that the club began to take off not long after.

“I joined on as a pastry chef and we developed menus together and hosted [meals],” Feeley said. “At first it was friends, but then it quickly turned into strangers and adults from the community who were coming and eating.”

Eventually, Tortuga became a monthly pop-up. Feeley and the founders, Larry and Kaia, began taking reservations and serving two seated dinners each month. Feeley said that this experience was pivotal in her decision to pursue a culinary career.

“It brought back my passion for pastry,” Feeley said. “I feel like that moment and that project re-unlocked pastry for me, and I just decided to try it.” 

During the summer of 2016, while Feeley was still living at Turtle House, she began baking croissants out of her home kitchen. Croissants are Feeley’s favorite food, but she said she could not find  quality croissants when she moved to Davis, so she decided to make and sell her own. 

“That’s when Driftwood first came into fruition,” Feeley said. “That was super tiny. I was putting out as many croissants as I could make on the weekends and taking pre-orders. I was selling like 40 croissants a weekend. It was at a very tiny scale.”

When fall quarter began, Driftwood was put on the back burner. Feeley refocused on her plant science studies, internship at UC Davis’s student farm and work at a viticulture lab on campus. It was at that lab that she met a mentor — Professor Alan Tenscher — who inspired her to follow her dream to become a chef. 

“He called it ‘killing the dream,’” Feeley said. “He said if you have a dream, you either […] chase it down and it becomes a reality, or you put it to bed and decide that it’s not your dream anymore and it’s not what you want to be doing.”

Feeley was approaching the end of her time at Davis and was not sure whether she wanted to begin looking for jobs in plant science. She still felt drawn to pastry, but was not sure if it was a feasible career path.

“I was currently studying plant biology, working in a viticulture lab — I was on [that] track,” Feeley said. “This pastry thing was a passion that had come up, not related to anything I was doing and [Tenscher] said, ‘you either chase your dream [in pastry] and then you come back to plant science, or that dream becomes what you’re doing.”

Feeley decided to take Tenscher’s advice, and upon finishing her undergraduate degree in 2018, she began working in pastry at Tartine Bakery in San Francisco before getting another position at Acme Bakery. When the COVID-19 pandemic began in March of 2020, she felt lucky to keep her job at Acme Bakery, where she was working in recipe development, but she wanted to make a change in her career trajectory.

Many of Feeley’s industry friends had lost their jobs when COVID-19 closures shut down their bakeries and restaurants, prompting them to open independent “pop-ups” serving their own food. Seeing this, Feeley was inspired to leave the corporate kitchen and pursue a pop-up herself.

An independent micro-bakery “aligned well with where I was feeling professionally because I was feeling without opportunities to express myself creatively,” Feeley said. “I wasn’t in a position where I was chef, so I didn’t have a lot of creative say. I was doing recipe development, so I was having more creative expression than others, but not enough for me.”

Feeley re-opened Driftwood Baking in December 2020, offering a menu of holiday-themed cookies and candy boxes. Since then, she has been hosting monthly pop-ups featuring new pastry menus each month, as well as taking custom cake orders. She operates this micro-bakery out of her home oven, and creates four to seven new recipes monthly. 

“I view this as a creative outlet and a creative project more than just a bakery or a means to an income,” Feeley said. “I really enjoy getting to continuously create new recipes.”

Despite the success of Driftwood over the past nine months, Feeley is not looking to expand. She recently moved to Los Angeles and is pursuing a career outside of the kitchen, as she does not want to rely on it for income. 

Feeley said that restaraunt kitchen culture can be full of anger and violence, including sexual harassment, and that in corporate kitchens, she has found that such toxicity commonly goes unchecked. But Feeley says that’s not the case at Driftwood. 

“It’s a little precious thing that I don’t want to be compromised,” Feeley said. “I don’t want to have to try to rely on it for my income because then I don’t want to be pushing production first. I want it to just be a creative project where I have another income and then I’m able to let the products shine.”

Despite Driftwood being a “hobby” for Feeley, it is a time-consuming production. She said that the two weeks before pop-up menus go live, she spends the majority of her time preparing recipes. Sometimes, recipes can be perfected in just three iterations, but others she ends up testing more than six times before she is content. Generally, she spends one week brainstorming recipe ideas and researching ingredients, and another week perfecting cook time, measurements and ingredients. 

As for recipe creation, Feeley is inspired by the seasons and what she learned about seasonal produce working at the student farm at UC Davis.

“I let my creativity lead,” Feeley said. “I draw a ton of inspiration from my time at Davis. [My] experience really honed my love of nature and my appreciation of how the seasons ebb and flow and how nature really provides for us. Every different season a new fruit is coming in. In the winter it gets cold, but then there are oranges that are full of bright juice. I really tried to emulate sentiments in my desserts [and] highlight the season at that moment and its beauty.”

She also prioritizes sourcing local ingredients for her recipes, both to lessen her environmental footprint and maintain the quality of her food.

“Even if you don’t focus on ‘sustainability,’ I think it’s important to emphasize the fact that these methods just lead to better food,” Feeley said. “Sustainability is appealing beyond environmental impact and social impact because when you eat local and when you eat well-grown food, you can taste it.”

Feeley sources hyper-local produce from California and neighboring states and does not use products grown with heavy pesticides. She also prioritizes working with farms that pay living wages to their staff and foster healthy working environments.

Currently, Feeley is preparing for her October pop-up, for which she is brainstorming a pastry menu that captures the current season — the transition from summer to fall. One ingredient she feels captures this essence is fresh pears. 

“I love pears and chocolate, but for me personally, it feels too warm for chocolate,” Feeley said. “I view chocolate as very heavy in that it warms me up in the winter, so I would turn to something lighter like almonds. Almond frangipane goes really nicely with pear so maybe I would do those together and kind of play on this early autumn, late summer flux point where warm spices are welcome, but we still want a little bit of juicy brightness from the summer.” 

For information on the date and location of Feeley’s October pop-up, which will be in North Oakland, as well as for custom cake orders, visit Driftwood’s website or follow the bakery on Instagram. 

Written by: Katie DeBenedetti — features@theaggie.org

Editor’s Note: Future Driftwood Baking pop-ups will take place in Los Angeles. Refer to their website for the latest information.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Feeley’s statement about kitchen toxicity. The article has been updated to correct the error.

Dr. Estella Atekwana shares how her education experience informs her leadership today

As many students have just arrived on campus for the first time, so has Dr. Estella Atekwana, the newly named dean of the College of Letters and Sciences. Though she never expected herself to work in the field of university administration — or live in California — Dr. Atekwana was drawn to UC Davis because of the way that the values of the university aligned with her own values and her student experience. 

Atekwana was born in Cameroon in West Central Africa, where she lived until she was 19. After graduating from high school, she wanted to enroll in university, but said that there was only one university in Cameroon at the time, and courses there were taught entirely in French. 

Atekwana grew up in the English speaking region of Cameroon, and even though that region accounts for 25% of the country’s population, the university taught no courses in English. Ultimately, Atekwana decided to search for higher education elsewhere and ended up attending Howard University in Washington, D.C. for both her undergraduate and masters programs.

Atekwana says that the reason she moved to the U.S. for school was because she had to follow the access — to courses taught in her language and scholarships that she needed to continue school — that were presented to her.

“This is what a lot of students face today,” Atekwana said. “How do you pay for school? I was a foreign student, and how do you pay for school as a foreign student when it will be more expensive? If your parents can’t afford it, then you’ve got to figure out ways of paying for it.”

After completing both her bachelors and masters degrees at Howard, studying geology, Atekwana made another international move. She attended Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, where she got her Ph.D. in geophysics. After her time at Howard, Atekwana wanted to advance her education further, but she struggled to find universities in the U.S. that would give her scholarships as an international Ph.D. student. During her time in the masters program at Howard, one of her advisors suggested that she apply to schools in Canada, which ultimately led to her moving to Dalhouse. 

“That is why I think that faculty members have such a big role to play in influencing students and their career pathways, as well as opening up opportunities for them,” Atekwana said. “That’s what happened in this case. He told me, ‘You should apply to schools in Canada,’ and I did apply to schools in Canada, and I got in and they gave me a scholarship.”

Atekwana said that she never expected to work in university administration when she was in school; her goal was to get her doctorate degree and teach geology at a university. After graduating from Dalhousie, she returned to the states, and began to fulfill that dream, teaching at Western Michigan University (WMU). While she was in her first year working at WMU, her department chair at the time, Dr. Thomas Strew, noticed her leadership skills and suggested that she would serve well in an administrative role. 

“The department chair who hired me recognized some leadership qualities in me and started saying, ‘You would make a good department chair,’” Atekwana said. “It didn’t register to me, because I never really saw administration have a career path for me, but as I continued in my career, teaching students, mentoring students, I started appreciating the challenges that students were going through and also opportunities of how we could really enhance the success of our students. I also saw potential in the departments that I was working in, […] and I was also really interested in department governance.” 

Atekwana said that for many years, she didn’t consider taking on an administrative role; however, over a decade later, while she was teaching at Oklahoma State University, she was given the opportunity to become a department chair and she took it. 

“I could have a lot more influence if I became a department chair, to help shape the direction of the department, and also to help shape the lives of the students,” Atekwana said. “I decided that even though I was heavily, heavily ingrained in my research, that if I wanted to have more influence and truly impact most students I could do that in a service position as a department chair.”

Since then, Atekwana has served in many administrative roles. Most recently, Atekwana worked at the University of Delaware as the dean of the College of Earth, Ocean and Environment. She said that she often wishes Strew could see where she is now, so many years after he first mentioned her knack for leadership.

“I always wanted to serve, and I’ve always been somebody who’s very interested in making other people’s lives better, making things work for people,” Atekwana said. “He just recognized that in me, and he mentioned it to me. I was thinking about him the other day and wondering where he is to see where I am today. I’m sure he would be very pleased.”

When she got the opportunity to come to UC Davis, Atekwana said that she went through the process she always does when career opportunities arise. She asks herself, “What is the direction of this institution? Does it align with my own priorities?” Atekwana said that she found that UC Davis was a perfect match. Not only did she see her philosophy reflected in the values of the university, but also her own experience.

“I’ve really been interested in the social mobility of students, because I saw myself coming from Africa,” Atekwana said. “UC Davis is in the top ranked in social mobility. I also like the fact that it’s a number one destination for international students; I was an international student myself at one point in time. Forty percent of students at UC Davis are first gen students; I was a first generation student. [Davis has] a high percentage of underrepresented minorities, […] and I’m a minority myself.” 

Atekwana also said that she was drawn to UC Davis because of its faculty.

“Even though it’s a number one institution with faculty that are award winning faculty, […] [they’re] still passionate about teaching students,” Atekwana said. “That’s what I’ve always wanted. The best researchers should also make the best teachers. They should bring their research, the excitement of that research, to the classroom to inspire students.”

Since she arrived on campus on Aug. 1, Atekwana has been busy acquainting herself with the departments in the College of Letters and Sciences, as well as preparing for students to return to campus after 18 months online. She said that one of her biggest projects for the fall and potentially winter is her “listening tours,” which have already begun, and have allowed her to hear directly from faculty in Letters and Sciences departments. 

Atekwana said that at this moment, handling the return to campus amidst the COVID-19 pandemic is her top concern. She is prioritizing making sure campus is not only a safe environment for students and staff, but also that it is the best learning environment during this time. She said that increased awareness of mental health and student success are crucial at this time. Atekwana is especially interested in making sure that the school addresses students affected by the pandemic in an equitable manner.

“The pandemic was really challenging on all of us, but disproportionately affected more women and underrepresented minorities than other populations,” Atekwana said. “So the question that I’m asking myself right now […] is how do we send our students and our faculty and our staff up for success?”

Atekwana’s first plan to address these student needs is ensuring that the college has enough counselors and advisors to guide students through academic and mental health challenges. She is also working with student affairs to connect students with resources that UC Davis has available for their specific situations.

Aside from the pandemic, Atekwana has lofty goals for her first year on campus. She said that her three goals for the year are getting to know the college as a whole, highlighting the importance of a liberal arts education and creating a new strategic plan for the new direction of the college.

She also wants to prioritize diversity, equity and inclusion in all of her decision making.

“I’ve also been a big champion of diversity, equity and inclusion,” Atekwana said. “That’s going to be fundamental in everything that I do, to integrate more equity and inclusion. We already have the diversity in terms of students, but unfortunately, our faculty demographics do not match our student demographics. That is something that we need to work on. There’s an opportunity for growth in that particular area.”

Ultimately, Atekwana hopes to raise the status of the College of Letters and Sciences. As the largest college on UC Davis’s campus, Atekwana believes it is important to remind the community of the importance of the college and of a liberal arts education. 

“I think the skills that we provide our students — critical thinking, writing skills, communication skills, problem solving skills — are skills that employers want and they need,” Atekwana said. “Our students probably would better weather the flex of the changing job landscape because they have the skills that will allow them to be very flexible.”

Written by: Katie DeBenedetti— features@theaggie.org