Walking into New York City’s Mah-Ze-Dahr Bakery, you won’t see any indication that the self-trained head chef and founder, Umber Ahmad ’94, was once a teenage professional violinist turned MIT biology major turned banker—or that she still does commercial voice-overs, consults on global branding in her spare time, and has had her pilot’s license since age 16. One taste of the pastries, however, and you can sense there’s something unique at work here. The brownies are reminiscent of ones you might have had as a child—moist and dense—but with an added flavor that’s hard to pinpoint. That’s the bittersweet cocoa and French butter, Ahmad says. In Urdu, the name of her bakery alludes to the magic or essence that makes something special.
The daughter of Pakistani immigrants, Ahmad grew up in Michigan with a love of food instilled by her mom and cultivated by baking lessons from her Finnish caretaker. Until about six years ago, however, that passion stayed in the background. With aspirations to become a surgeon, Ahmad chose MIT for its biology program; after graduating, she earned a master’s in public health at the University of Michigan. “I became more interested in health care in a larger global and societal format,” she explains.
But working in health care, where the organizations she worked with often hit roadblocks when they tried to access capital, turned Ahmad’s ever-curious mind toward finance. She earned her MBA from Wharton and went on to Wall Street, working in investment banking and private equity. When she progressed to running her own investment advising firm—with numerous clients in the hospitality field—her career and her baking hobby finally started to converge. The turning point was when one of her clients, celebrity chef Tom Colicchio, asked for a few samples of her baked goods after hearing a mutual friend rave about a birthday cake she’d made.
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