All 3 ladies are little-batch food makers and regulars at area marketplaces and bazaars, and they are also all pandemic pivoters.
The collaboration strategy started with O’Neil. Before COVID hit, she used 20 years as an celebration planner and was functioning at the JW Marriott in Cherry Creek in 2020 when she was furloughed for the reason that of the pandemic. “Since I felt protected that I was heading back again to a career in about sixty times, I determined that I needed to actually consider to acquire gain of this reward of time I had been offered,” she remembers.
O’Neil had always been an avid baker, and had a name amid her close friends for bringing stellar desserts to any collecting. For her father’s seventieth birthday, she stocked her parents’ freezer with frozen cookie dough that they could take pleasure in as a take care of following evening meal. Even soon after the birthday stash was depleted, her father held nagging her for re-ups of his frozen cookie dough correct, she recollects.
The pandemic gave her time and area for creativity, so she started off to establish her very own recipes, experimenting with the imaginative flavor combinations that would finally evolve into Ship Flours Baking favorites, this kind of as the malted vanilla Pudgy Boyfriend cookie with pretzel crunch, peanut butter and chocolate chips, and the Snack Attack, which is encouraged by the type of cheese crackers and peanut butter sandwiches uncovered in lots of elementary-faculty lunch packing containers.
For sixty times in 2020, O’Neil turned a cookie fairy, dropping off treats at the doorsteps of neighbors and pals, all the whilst expecting to rejoin the workforce shortly. But when she and her co-workers confirmed up at the Marriott for a assembly two months into the pandemic shutdown, they had been explained to they ended up remaining laid off for excellent.
“I let myself wallow above the weekend of obtaining laid off, and then I was like, ‘I feel I’m heading to have a cookie dough business enterprise now,’” she suggests. She did her 1st bake sale in May well 2020 at FlyteCo Brewing at 38th and Tennyson. That is exactly where she met Schlichter of Chin Dribblin’, who provides FlyteCo with its curried beer mustard. Schlichter started her sauce model through the pandemic, following a long time of running eating places and sensation burnt out. Due to the fact that time, the two she and O’Neil have become staples at marketplaces, festivals and bazaars in the metro place.
Right after getting to be buddies next the FlyteCo gig, O’Neil and Schlichter decided to share a booth at the Sloan’s Lake Spring Bazaar this previous May perhaps. They tossed all over the thought of building a cookie all-around Schlichter’s Spicy Pineapple Peanut sauce for the occasion.
O’Neil was confident that the flavor profile would be awesome in her peanut butter cookie dough. “[I] just wished the notes of the spicy, the sweet, the lime and the ginger to play on the flavors,” she explains.
She began tests the plan utilizing an adapted version of her grandmother’s brittle recipe. The benefits were promising, but there was a single dilemma: Generating a a single-off batch of brittle was not a significant offer for O’Neil, but building it in bulk was not a business she wished to get into. Brittle is a specialty confection, and as a baker, she experienced no drive to have to routinely deal with caramel.
Which is since caramel is “the napalm of the kitchen,” jokes Restivo, whose business enterprise, Ms Margaret Maker, solely can make gluten-cost-free, nut-cost-free, vegan pumpkin seed brittle. She and O’Neil met in February when they were booth neighbors at the Valentine’s Bazaar in Belmar. They instantaneously bonded about their similar histories: Each grew up close to St. Louis before shifting to Denver and turning their enthusiasm projects into corporations.
Back in St. Louis, Restivo experienced trained as a pastry chef at L’Ecole Culinaire and worked at Truffles in Ladue, which is exactly where she created her pumpkin brittle recipe in 2011. “It was all around the holidays, and my grandma utilised to make peanut brittle when I was a kid as a holiday deal with,” Restivo points out. “I was feeling really nostalgic, and I resolved to sneak it on to the cookie plate we experienced on the menu. But the pastry chef in me just went, ‘I can make this much better. I can make this lighter and sexier [by substituting pumpkin seeds for peanuts].'”
The brittle promptly grew to become a strike. In 2012, Restivo moved to Denver and continued her culinary job at Linger, but once COVID shut down eating places, she decided to take edge of the Cottage Food items Act to provide her pumpkin seed brittle directly to people. She formally included Ms Margaret Maker in December 2020, then invested 6 months perfecting her recipes, sourcing elements and developing labels and packaging.
Changing from a professional kitchen area to her dwelling kitchen area was not devoid of its road blocks. She was used to the benefits of owning suppliers supply components to the restaurant’s doorstep. Now she was coordinating pickups for 200 kilos of uncooked pumpkin seeds by herself. At the time she nailed down the recipe and process, her to start with market place was the Sloan’s Lake Bazaar in June 2021.
Practically two several years afterwards, at the similar marketplace, O’Neil posed the concern of collaborating: Would Restivo be intrigued in creating a Thai-spiced pumpkin seed brittle inspired by Schlichter’s Spicy Peanut Pineapple sauce that would then go into her Thai Dye For peanut butter cookie? “Then we would have this cookie that incorporates a few gals who met carrying out these markets, who all started out our businesses about the similar time,” states O’Neil.
Restivo needed no convincing. “I acquired a bottle of sauce from Ali that day and then went house and started enjoying,” she remembers. It took a few iterations, but she came up with a recipe that infuses her caramel base with lemongrass extract, fresh new ginger, lime peel and kaffir lime leaf. Then she makes the pumpkin seed brittle as standard ahead of sprinkling on dehydrated lime zest and chili flakes.
She describes the taste as a roller coaster: It starts out spicy, “and then the lime type of kicks in, the ginger sweeps in and rounds out the heat,” Restivo suggests. “Then you get some superior, virtually palate-cleaning heat and some brightness from the lime zest.”
Leading of head in establishing this new “collabrittle,” as it truly is referred to as on the packaging, was making certain a equilibrium of flavors that stay real to the sauce and achieving a texture that would work well with O’Neil’s cookie dough. As for the cookie, O’Neil crunches up the brittle and mixes it into her traditional peanut butter dough, then sprinkles the prime with extra parts of brittle prior to baking. The ensuing handle is tender and gooey, with occasional bursts of warmth and citrus and charming crunchies all through from the brittle melting and re-caramelizing.
“We don’t have co-workers anymore, so our other vendors are like our co-workers and collaborators that we can bounce tips off of. And so it’s just amazing, and Margaret is generally so psyched about items, so it’s entertaining to work with her on stuff,” says O’Neil.
Schlichter echoes the sentiment: “It’s been this sort of a pleasurable ride and these kinds of a fun time collaborating with this sort of outstanding makers. Each Lindsey and Margaret are so talented, and I love obtaining them as friends, and astounding inspiration for females in business. I’m so grateful for all the relationships I’ve developed in this group,” she says.
The collaboration has helped all of their businesses, in particular when all 3 happen to be at the identical market. “I convey to persons, ‘Oh, if you like this cookie, you should go see Margaret and get the brittle, and then go ideal following doorway to Ali, and she has the sauce.’ All a few of us are carrying out our variation of that,” suggests O’Neil.
They are presently speaking about undertaking additional collaborations, as perfectly as potentially advertising each other’s things. Other long term designs are in the is effective, way too. “I would like to have a bakery-espresso store and then do manufacturing in the back again for the frozen cookie dough,” states O’Neil.
“Ultimately, I hope the brittle enterprise potential customers me to be ready to open a restaurant or cafe of my very own,” Resitvo adds. “That was usually the dream.”
Chin Dribblin’, Ms Margaret Maker and Send Flours Baking will all be on hand for the Four Mile Historic Park Pumpkin Competition Oct 14 and 15. For far more information and facts, follow them on Instagram @chindribblinllc, @ms.margaretmaker and @sendfloursbakingco.
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