Marie Axelle, 26, left a career designing spacecraft at NASA to pursue a new full-time role as a self-taught pastry chef, saying the precision and problem-solving of engineering have helped her create elaborate cakes and pastries.
Axelle, who lives in McLean, Virginia, said baking has long been a family practice that connected her to her mother and siblings while she was growing up in the Ivory Coast. She told the Daily Mail that she first revived baking after moving to the United States on a scholarship at 17 and feeling the loneliness of life far from home.
"At first, I was living with my dad's friend and his family, but then eventually I moved out on my own, and it gets lonely, you know?" Axelle said. "I ended up picking up baking again, but really as a way to connect back with my mom, talk to her on the phone, like: 'Hey, how did you make this recipe?' Or 'I can't find this ingredient here in the US, what could I substitute it with?'"
Axelle said she grew up in a household of five children where she and her mother often baked cookies, cakes and madeleines, and that those early experiences shaped both her palate and her sense of baking as a way to bring people together. After earning a mechanical engineering degree and working in spacecraft design, she decided to leave NASA and focus on making luxurious celebration cakes.
She described the work of baking and cake design as similar to engineering in several respects. Axelle said that the attention to tolerances, the discipline of testing and iteration, and the ability to break complex projects into manageable steps all transferred from her technical training to her kitchen practice. Those skills guided her as she developed recipes, scaled components for multi-tiered cakes and refined finishes for clients.
Axelle learned many techniques independently, experimenting at home and adapting recipes when certain ingredients were not available. She said much of her early learning came from conversations with her mother and trial-and-error in the kitchen, and that the experience of designing assemblies and systems for spacecraft informed the way she plans and executes elaborate bakes.
Her move to full-time pastry work reflects a broader pattern of professionals changing careers to follow creative or culinary interests, though Axelle framed the decision in personal terms: a desire to combine the technical satisfaction of problem-solving with the social, connective aspects of sharing food. She has marketed her cakes as luxurious, designed for celebrations, and said customer feedback and word of mouth have been important to building her clientele.
Axelle's story underscores how technical training can translate into unexpected fields and how cultural traditions — in her case, family baking passed down from her mother — can steer career and personal choices. She continues to draw on both her engineering background and her childhood culinary memories as she develops new offerings and seeks to grow her business.
Axelle declined to specify the NASA center where she worked. Her comments about reconnecting with her mother and the role of baking in her life were made in an interview with the Daily Mail.