Cookie maker turns hobby into tasty business
Story by Scottie Vickery
Photos by Kelsey Bain
Submitted photos
Mandi King’s first attempt at decorating cookies was disastrous at best. The icing was runny, the colors were off and she had a big mess on her hands. Undaunted, she discovered that determination mixed with lots of practice turned out to be the perfect recipe for success.
These days, her cookie designs are nothing short of “a-dough-rable,” and King has started a thriving cottage business, Mad Batter Cookie Co., filling orders out of her home in Moody. It turns out that what seemed like a half-baked idea had some real merit, and King is one smart – and creative – cookie.
Her cookies come in all shapes and designs – everything from mittens to pencils to fish and trains. She has made edible versions of baby carriages, wine bottles, superheroes, sailboats, cartoon characters and ice cream cones. She’s even made cookies decorated like lipsticks, tubs of popcorn and the poop emoji.
“My absolute favorite thing is when someone gives me free rein,” King said. “I love that challenge of being able to design my own ideas.”
The 30-year-old King is one of a number of St. Clair County bakers who are turning sugar, butter and flour into tiny works of art. The decorated cookie craze has taken off and King, for one, loves the opportunity it provides to explore her artistic side. “I’ve always loved doodling and drawing, so this has been a lot of fun,” she said.
Starting from scratch
The first step, though, was to learn how to bake a batch of cookies, much less decorate them. “I love to cook, but I’d never been a great baker,” she said. “I don’t have a sweet tooth, so I’ve never really had the inclination.”
So why even bother? Chalk it up to boredom, King said. It was September 2019, and she and her husband, Anthony, had lived in their new home for about a month. Theirs was the first house in the neighborhood, and they didn’t have access to cable or internet yet. “I decided I needed a hobby,” she said. “I looked at my husband and said, ‘I’m going to do this.’”
The next day, they bought cookie cutters, icing and the ingredients for a cookie recipe she found online. A few hours later, she had botched her first batch. “It was the biggest blob,” King said. “The icing was too runny and all of it was just a big fail.”
King is nothing if not determined, though. “I can be a perfectionist, so I’m going to keep doing it over and over until I get it right,” she said. “They tasted good, so I thought surely I could get the decorating down.”
She kept at it, and a few weeks later when the couple threw a Halloween party, she wowed their friends with her culinary creations. After making some cookies for a friend’s baby shower, she started getting more requests. Strangers began to reach out to her via social media. “I wasn’t charging people for the longest time, but my friends convinced me to make it a business and to really grow it.”
King can bake and sell her cookies from home under Alabama’s Cottage Food Law, and she has business licenses from the state and city. She officially started her business in February 2020 and has made thousands of cookies since then. Her smallest order has been a dozen, and she once made more than 300 cookies for a corporate order.
In addition to iced cookies, she offers cookie cakes, hot cocoa bombs and macarons, which are meringue-based cookies. “Macarons are incredibly hard to make,” she said, adding that she likes to experiment with different flavors like cinnamon sugar and bacon. “They’re incredibly temperamental.”
Cutting up
The iced cookies are her main draw, though, and she’s made them for birthday parties, wedding showers, baby showers, gender reveals, “promposals” and other events. They start at $40 a dozen, which includes up to four colors of icing, and more complex designs cost extra. “Each cookie takes about 20 minutes to decorate, and some take upwards of 40,” she said. “I’m definitely getting faster at it, though.”
She’s also added lots of flavors to the mix. After tweaking her original recipe many times, she now offers cookie dough in 14 flavors (including sugar, blueberry, red velvet, key lime and rum) and icing in seven flavors, such as cream cheese, orange, coconut, vanilla and banana.
Her cookie cutter collection has grown, too. “I’ve got well over 400 cookie cutters now, and I recently bought a 3D printer, so I can design and print my own cookie cutters,” she said. “I can make any kind of shape anyone is thinking of, and any size, too.”
Now that King has turned pro, she’s happy to share some of her secrets. She’s offered a few cookie decorating classes at Rails and Ales in Leeds, and she said she hopes to have more in the future. She shares a variety of techniques during the 2-hour class, which costs $45, and participants decorate six cookies they get to take home.
Although King, a sales representative for a security company, is loving her new business venture, she said juggling a full-time job and a part-time business can be tricky. “This is my 5-to-9 and weekends job,” she said. “I try to limit myself to three orders a week. I had no idea it would take off like this.”
Overall, though, the experience has been a sweet one. “It’s so much fun,” King said. “And my husband loves it. He gets to be the taste tester and eat all the reject cookies.”
