Caroline Ballam laces up her running shoes and heads out the door. She’s running a marathon today, which means she has approximately 26.2 miles to clear her mind and think about a lot of things—issues with a recipe, a great dessert idea, a solution to a problem in the kitchen.
For Ballam, running is interwoven with her work as a chef. Both require dedication, physical ability, and constant refinement of techniques. As a graduate of The Culinary Institute of America who built her career in luxury hotels and Michelin-recognized restaurants across the country, she is familiar with the mindset needed for success.
She got her start as a child with a cookbook called “A to Z on Baking.” She grew up in a household that activated both sides of the brain—her father worked for NASA in central Florida, and her mother studied art. The world of pastries, with its blend of creativity and precision, gave her a way to draw from both.
Today, as pastry chef for Conrad Orlando at Evermore, Ballam has reached a full-circle moment in her career, returning to the region where her love for baking began. As she develops dessert menus for concepts like Sophia’s Trattoria and Ceiba located inside the AAA Five Diamond luxury resort, she is reminded of the weekends spent baking cookies with her mother.
“It’s been nice to step back and see my return to Orlando as a full-circle moment,” Ballam says. “You start with these big dreams and ambitions, then work so hard and so long to achieve them. I wish I could tell my 7-year-old self that everything works out in the end, despite the trials and worries.”
With pastry courses marking the final moment of a dining experience, Ballam seeks to showcase the full potential of pastry chefs through intentional, from-scratch techniques. It is a labor of love—and guests can taste and see the difference between handmade and processed.
“It’s easy to take shortcuts nowadays, especially with the high cost of labor and ingredients. But we don’t want to lose these skills because they are an art form,” Ballam says. “Sometimes we get overlooked in the grand scheme of things, but we are an important part of this industry and make a big impact on the guest experience when dining out.”
After serving as executive pastry chef at The Tampa Edition—where she oversaw seven outlets and helped earn three consecutive one-star Michelin awards for the hotel’s fine-dining restaurant, Lilac—she’s now preparing her team at Conrad Orlando at Evermore for Michelin-standard growth in the pastry field.
“I think about my mentor and what she did for me, and that’s how I want my team to grow. I want to make sure they love coming to work, that they’re having fun and getting comfortable with being artistically challenged,” Ballam says. “I don’t ever want to become an office chef. I want to be on the floor with them, coaching them through new skills and letting them watch and learn.”
Her food philosophy is a mosaic of all her culinary endeavors, but it rests on a simple foundation: she lets the food speak to her. Instead of stressing out over finding “the next best thing,” she takes a step back. What’s in season? How does this ingredient taste and feel? What pairs well with it?
She points to a specific experience at a farm-to-table restaurant, where she’d go out onto the farm and handpick produce. One day, the farmers kept dropping off bushels of peaches—400 pounds of them lying in the back hall—so she sat down and brainstormed multiple ways to fully utilize this one ingredient.
“You really had to learn how to process and preserve these peaches to push them through,” Ballam says. “You’re coming up with jams, you’re using different cooking methods, you’re taking these really rustic skill sets and using them to create a very fine dining moment for guests.”
She believes in keeping her processes as from-scratch as possible, continuously pushing her team to refine their skills, cross-train, and draw inspiration from the foundations—fresh ingredients, precision, and the desire to tell a story that guests take with them long after they’ve left the table.
“The more our pastry chefs are capable of, and the more passionate they are about this industry, the more it keeps the pastry field growing and our standards high,” Ballam says. “If we’re producing to the best of our ability, we’re able to create this ‘wow’ moment for guests when the final plate is served to them at the end of their meal.”
