Meet the Pickwick & Cherry Team

Katie Kring is the owner and culinary director of Pickwick & Cherry. She founded the small-batch bakery that became Pickwick & Cherry in 2010 and began teaching hands-on baking classes in 2014, after saying yes to a class that did not technically exist yet. What began with bread has grown into one of the region’s most varied calendars of participatory food experiences.

Katie develops Pickwick & Cherry’s culinary programming and leads classes in artisan bread and pastry, regional American cooking, and cuisines from around the world. Her menus are built through research, travel, language study, conversations, and collaboration. She is particularly interested in the point where a traditional food or distinctive regional product becomes genuinely useful and beloved in an ordinary American kitchen.

Her baking has been recognized by Feast and 417 Magazine, including Best Pastry Chef and Best Bread Baker honors. She has baked way, way more than 100,000 loaves of bread and has spent more than a decade teaching people how to make difficult things feel possible.

Katie is also an internationally performed composer, lyricist, and theatre writer. She holds an MFA in Musical Theatre Writing from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and a BFA from the University of Michigan. Her knowledge is unusually wide-ranging, crossing food science, history, languages, agriculture, business, music, theatre, and the strange routes connecting them. Her range is broad enough that asking a room to guess the subject of her master’s degree has produced answers from nearly every academic department.

That breadth shapes the way Katie teaches. Her classes combine serious culinary instruction with quick wit, irreverent storytelling, and the conviction that people learn difficult things more easily when they are laughing.

In addition to public classes, Katie develops private and corporate experiences, youth programs, off-site demonstrations, product education, cultural collaborations, and food-centered presentations for organizations and media. 

Taylor Herzog is one of Pickwick & Cherry’s primary instructors and teaches an unusually broad range of cooking and baking experiences. She leads date-night menus inspired by the cuisines of Italy, Portugal, Britain, Greece, and beyond, as well as selected lunch programs, fresh pasta workshops, cookie decorating classes, and other hands-on culinary experiences.

Taylor combines strong practical instruction with warmth, humor, and an instinctive ability to read a room. She makes complicated projects feel manageable, keeps a kitchen full of people moving, and helps both new and experienced cooks understand what to look for as they work. She is also especially good with young cooks, bringing patience, encouragement, and considerable fun to children’s classes and camps.

Beyond the kitchen, Taylor is a sought-after vocalist who performs with the Springfield Chamber Chorus and Missouri Choral Artists, in addition to her work as a soloist. Her musical background contributes to the confidence, timing, and lively presence she brings to teaching. Whether she is guiding a date-night dinner, a fresh pasta class, or a room full of children decorating cookies, Taylor creates experiences that are organized, generous, skillful, and genuinely fun.

Santiago Posada Marín is a Colombian violinist, award-winning composer, educator, culinary instructor, and one of Pickwick & Cherry’s closest creative collaborators. Originally from Pereira, Colombia, he is a gifted ambassador for Colombian cuisine, music, and culture, bringing both serious knowledge and tremendous warmth to everything he teaches.

Katie and Santiago developed Pickwick & Cherry’s musical-gastronomy programming together, combining hands-on cooking, cultural storytelling, and live performance. He leads Taco Tuesday, Salsa & Strings, and other Colombian, Latin American, and Caribbean programs. Guests cook and share a meal with him, and then the chef-instructor puts down the knives and picks up his violin. Santiago is an engaging and generous teacher, an excellent storyteller, and, importantly, an absolute hoot.

Santiago performs with the Springfield Symphony Orchestra and also works as a composer, arranger, conductor, and music director. Fluent in Spanish and English, he is also highly proficient in French and Italian and speaks pretty good German, giving him an unusually broad ability to connect with people, music, and culinary traditions across cultures.

Through an entirely reasonable chain of events, Santiago is also Pickwick & Cherry’s resident vanilla enthusiast. He leads tastings and teaches the origins, aromas, extraction methods, spirit pairings, and culinary uses of vanilla from around the world.