One might think that with a last name like Baker, one would take this rather broad hint from fate as a direction in life, but actually Mustard’s Grill pastry chef Annie Baker spent 10 years as an accountant before giving up bean counting to pursue a passion for mixing flour, sugar and butter.

Baker also worked as a stand-up comic during her student years at St. Mary’s College in South Bend, and her zany sense of humor resonates as she recounts tales of her pre-baker days.

“I grew up in Pittsburgh, and when my friends heard I was going to an all girls’ school, they thought I was joining a convent. But I said, ‘Hey, there’s a school across the street, and it has guys.” That would be Notre Dame.

After graduating she headed to Chicago to work, but during those number crunching days, she was also baking. “It was my form of yoga,” she said. “On weekends I baked.”

The only problem was her husband was eating all her creations. “He finally said to me, ‘You’ve got to give some of this away.’ So I started taking things in to work.”

Thus her reputation grew. “I wanted feedback,” she noted, “but hey, it was an office. They eat anything. They would say, ‘Wow, you’re in the wrong field.’”

It got to the point, she said, “where I’d get a call from the president and he’d say, ‘I heard you made cookies.”

After she’d worked at the accounting firm “long enough to pay off my student loans,” she said, “then I thought, ‘Now what do I want to do with my life?’”

Baker’s husband was transferred to San Francisco,  and they embarked on a long-distance marriage until the day she was visiting him and they made an excursion to wine country.

Baker had been to the Napa Valley before, as a child visiting with her parents, and she had as much enthusiasm for it as any child has who gets to hang around the flower beds while her parents have a great time tasting wines. “I put up with it as long as afterward we could go to Sam’s (restaurant) in Sausalito. They made a great peanut butter pie.”

But on this trip with her husband, they passed the imposing stone edifice of Greystone in St. Helena. Once the Christian Brothers Winery, today it’s the West Coast headquarters of the Culinary Institute of America, which offers, among other courses, a 30-week baking program. “I saw this beautiful building,” Baker recalled, “and then I found out what they did there, and I thought, ‘This is my destiny.’”

She gave three-months notice to her Chicago company — “not one person questioned me,” she noted — and she headed west to join her husband and the CIA baking program. She was in heaven — and she made plans to stay there: She decided she wanted to work at  Mustard’s Grill, the popular, populist Yountville eatery: Among its many claims to fame is having served more than 1,000,000 pork chops.

Why Mustard’s? “I knew what kind of desserts they served,” she said. “I wanted to make desserts my mother would understand. I knew I’d be proud to make those kind of desserts.”

“I pursued Mustard’s,” she said. “I was there all the time, saying ‘Hi, it’s me; I’m interested in working here.’ Cindy (Pawlcyn, Mustard’s owner) was like, ‘An accountant wants to be my pastry chef? Explain this to me.’”

And Pawlcyn hired her. That was four years ago, and since then Baker has been there five days a week at 6 in the morning to start turning out Mustard’s classics like the lemon-lime pie with “ridiculously high meringue” and the chocolate hazelnut truffle tart. She creates a crisp of the day, “and of course we do creme brulee, because people always want that.” She also makes Pawlcyn’s favorite dessert, a pistachio ice cream sandwich. And when she puts her peanut butter pie on the menu, patrons rave. “I got a call from a woman in Dallas who said, ‘I never do this, but we were at Mustard’s and — can you tell me how to make that peanut butter pie?’”

And the accounting background comes in handy, she added. “Baking has to be precise, like accounting.” She also keeps track of numbers — one month, she noted, she served 2,876 desserts. The result? She doesn’t bake at home as much as she used to “and my husband (who now works at Duckhorn winery) has lost a lot of weight.”

Baker shared two of her recipes for popular desserts at Mustard’s Grill, the fruit crisp and the rustic tart, a free-form version of a pie, in which the pastry is folded up over a fruit filling. A plus for both recipes, she noted, is their versatility. “You can use all kinds of fruits, depending on the season,” she said. Right now, with rhubarb and local strawberries in the markets, they make an irresistible combination for a spring celebration.