Cookie Company Wins Two sofi Awards in First Time Out
By Lorrie Baumann
In her first time entering the sofi Awards, the Specialty Food Association’s annual paean to creativity and craft in specialty foods, Susan Palmer, “The Girl in the Little Red Kitchen,” took home two statuettes in the baked goods and bakery desserts category. She won the silver award for her Monster Cookie Pie, a ready-to-bake spin on a skillet cookie that’s loaded with peanut butter, chocolate, oats and chocolate candy, while her Elvis Cookie Pie won a bronze sofi Award with its peanut butter, banana and chocolate to evoke Elvis Presley’s banana and peanut butter sandwiches. “I’d had the intention of entering for the past couple of years,” she said. Those plans fell apart, but, “This year, when I heard the announcement, I was on it.”
Palmer started her career in the specialty food business with a food blog that she named “The Girl in the Little Red Kitchen,” where she posted inspiration for home cooks and bakers along with recipes for Oatmeal Breakfast Bars with Almond Butter and Jam; Baked Brie en Croute with Honeyed Almonds, Cherries and Thyme and Honey Walnut Fig Cake around weekly meal plans for home cooks looking to change up their dinner repertoire with healthy options. “Writing and cooking have always been a passion of mine,” she said. “Everyone cooked in my family. My brother was a professional chef for a while…. My mom made everything from scratch. She worked full-time, and she would always come home and cook a delicious dinner every night. We visited farm stands before farmers markets were a thing.”
In 2011, she won her first local baking competition, Brooklyn, New York’s Cookie Takedown with a people’s choice award for her Chocolate Salty Cara-Mal-Lard Cookies, a triple chocolate cookie filled with caramel made with duck fat. The next year, she won more awards at the next Cookie Takedown, and she won an Ice Cream Takedown as well. “I took top prizes in a lot of competitions. That was when I decided I was doing something that people really like,” she said. “I was doing an office job that I wasn’t happy with, and I decided it was time to figure this out and move on from there.”
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Her blog was earning enough at that point to give her the freedom to chuck the job, and once she’d figured out that what she wanted to do next was to focus on cookies, she booked space in an incubator kitchen and launched a Kickstarter campaign to help her fund her Little Red Kitchen Bake Shop. She planned to take orders for cookies on her website, bake them in an incubator kitchen and put them in the mail the next day. “Anyone’s going to be happy if you cook a meal for them, but baked goods touch that special place in your heart,” she said. “Can you be unhappy if someone’s just handed you a cookie? I’m a happiness maker.”
It took a bit more than a year to develop the recipes for her first product line and get her business off the ground. Two years later, she invented cookie pies, giant cookies made from the best ingredients she could find, with doughs studded with inclusions and packed into foil pie pans and frozen ready to ship to consumers who’d bake them at home. She made several varieties: the Monster Cookie Pie that won the silver award this year; Chocolate Peanut Butter; Caramel Snickerdoodle and the Elvis Cookie Pie that won the bronze award. Those varieties are all available for wholesale. She also offers a couple of other varieties for local customers, Rocky Road and Kitchen Sink, which includes pretzels and potato chips. Rocky Road and Kitchen Sink don’t freeze well, so they’re not shipped or offered for wholesale.
Once her wholesale business started to take off, Palmer moved out of the incubator kitchen and into a commercial kitchen in Brooklyn. She put her blog on hiatus, and when she got the chance to enter the sofi Awards this year, she took it. Now she’s taking the COVID-19-enforced business slow-down as her opportunity to route a course for her journey chauffeured by sofi. She’s on the hunt for a sales agent who can broker her Cookie Pies along the East Coast, since her products arrive in their best condition when they’re in transit for no more than a day or two from Brooklyn. “I feel like we’re sort of in a holding pattern right now,” she said. “I’m looking for a New York-based broker. Sales has never been my strong point. I’m hoping that the sofi wins will lead me there.”