Record Award Winning Cake Shop Adds New Element to Appeal to Neighborhood

By: Mary Vitale

BROOKLINE – Ellen Bartlett unlocks her shop in time to see the sunrise as she prepares for another day of client appointments, baking instructions and artistic cake decorating. Bartlett is the owner and head baker of Cakes to Remember, a Brookline small business that specializes in baking and designing five-tier wedding and event cakes. Now, the shop also offers specially designed cookies.

“I think these artistically designed cookies will add a unique new element to the shop,” Bartlett said.

Bartlett says she has enjoyed baking and art since she was a child. Her ideas and ornately decorated cakes won Cakes to Remember the Improper Bostonian award last year for best wedding cakes. Since 1988, the shop has won Boston Magazine’s Best of Boston Award for wedding cakes a record five times. Susan Allen, an event planner who often recommends her clients to Cakes to Remember, attributes the shop’s success to Bartlett’s love of her craft.

“Ellen is by far the best person in the area [at making specialty cakes],” Allen said. “She is always my first choice to recommend to clients, mainly because she’s very creative, her cakes are excellent, and she’s extremely reliable.”

Bartlett wants her products to appeal more to her local Brookline clients, which is what prompted her to team up with Jennifer Shapiro, a marketing and pastry professional, to create a new line of cookies called Better Batch Cookies.

“I feel like these cookies will allow us to reach out more to local residents because they are much more low key and less expensive than our cakes,” Bartlett said.

Minimum prices for specialty cakes from Cakes to Remember usually run around $300 to $500, while a batch of cookies can be purchased for $12. Shapiro and Bartlett devised their plan last summer to make the cookies quickly and affordably.

“We really worked out a great system to massively produce cookies and sell them at a reasonable rate, while still making a great tasting and aesthetically pleasing cookie,” Shapiro said.

Shapiro said she and Bartlett make an effective team because of her background in marketing and advertising and Bartlett’s background in culinary.

Kim Stone, a Massachusetts event planner, said Bartlett made a smart move by creating a more casual product.

“It’s always great to keep the market fresh, and Ellen is great at that,” Stone said. “They [the cookies] really personalize an event, and they are also offered at a reasonably low cost compared to special occasion cakes.”

Better Batch Cookies are rectangular or circular sugar cookies that Bartlett designs with a variety of artistic decorations. The designs include business logos or advertisements, drawing likenesses of photographs for special events, public service announcements for charity fundraisers, or artistic patterns. Customers can order cookies from Cakes to Remember in batches of 12 and can request Bartlett add a personalized text message to them in addition to a background design. Allen said some of her clients have already requested samples of the cookies for their events.

“An elaborately decorated cake is not always the right choice for someone’s event,” Allen said. “The cookies give her another line of products to offer existing and new clients.”

Dana Briley, a recent graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, has worked for Bartlett at Cakes to Remember for the past two years as a baking assistant. She said Bartlett’s talent and knowledge of production has been a wonderful example to her.

“I really like working in a small business like this,” Briley said. “Everyone who works here is involved in everything. It’s not like a big factory job, where you just do one thing over and over again. There’s also so much to learn here about baking and running your own store.”

Bartlett said while baking and designing cakes remains her primary passion, she has enjoyed creating the new line of cookies.

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