Life & Work with Julie Clark of Springfield

Today we’d like to introduce you to Julie Clark.

All right, thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, how did you get started?
My journey into tastesoflizzyt.com began with my daughter Maddie’s sixth-grade midterm project for school. Maddie, who had a knack for writing, photography, and baking, combined her passions to create a cooking blog for a midterm school project. Inspired by the success of other food websites, I saw the potential for her daughter’s talent to reach a wider audience. Maddie and I shared her creations online and received praise from her teacher and readers worldwide. The positive feedback from a global audience fueled our excitement to share more recipes. As the kids have grown over the years, their roles in working on the website have changed, but it is still a family affair, from the recipe inspiration and taste testing to using their different talents to work together for success. Along with my daughters Maddie and Kinslee, I draw inspiration from cherished family recipes passed down through generations. I loved cooking from scratch and learned from my mom and grandma. As the blog gained momentum, I recognized its potential as more than a creative outlet. It became a platform for a successful home-based business. We were excited when we had our first 500 visitors in one day, and now we have grown to over 14 million users who visit our site each year.

It wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
The landscape of running an online web-based business has changed drastically over the past 11 years. What started as an outlet for me to develop a recipe quickly changed into me needing to learn how to be a photographer, videographer, social media manager, and data analyst, to name a few. I learned quickly that if you weren’t willing to adapt and shift to the industry’s changes, you would quickly get hidden, and it would be hard to recover. Most recently, changes with AI have made the landscape more competitive since AI can create food images and recipes in thousands of minutes. That’s hard to compete with. I’m encouraging my readers to recognize AI, that it is often an untested recipe made by a robot being shared, and continuing to work to build a community and serve the needs of my audience.

Thanks for sharing that. Please tell us more about your work.
I love sharing recipes made from scratch, but since we often spend all day in the kitchen baking, I need quick dinners that only require a little prep. Our audience loves our easy dinners, holiday recipes, and, most importantly, our cinnamon rolls! In the early 2000s, I created the best cinnamon roll recipe with a secret ingredient. Everyone would ask for the recipe, but my family wanted me to keep it private. In 2017, they finally agreed to let me share it with the world, and it immediately went viral. It has since gone viral over and over again. Our secret? Pour heavy cream over the cinnamon rolls before the bake. It makes them soft, gooey and delicious. We were the first to share that secret over 7 years ago.

How can people work with you, collaborate with you, or support you?
People can support me by sharing our recipe website with others. Tastes of Lizzy T offers free recipes, which we have tested, and thousands of other followers have tried. If you find a recipe you love, share it and tag us @tastesoflizzyt on social media so that we can see it. We love seeing other people make our recipes! We have two cookbooks that will be published soon, one in 2024 featuring our best cinnamon roll recipes and the other in early 2025 featuring the proven winners from our website.

Contact Info:

• Website: tastesoflizzyt.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tastesoflizzyt/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TastesofLizzyT/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-clark-6a648b114/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHnJbFuXYvWj-Ez34LII9oQ
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@tastesoflizzyt

Image Credits
Madison Stover