West Seattle is home to many notable bakeries – from Bakery Nouveau to Heavenly Pastry and Cake to Shoofly Pie Company to Coffee to a Tea with Sugar to The Original Bakery, and more! We happened onto the story of a one-person bakery too … Manderin Cookie Company.
(Amanda Nokes, photographed during WSB interview at Uptown Espresso in The Junction)
Story and photo by Keri DeTore
Reporting for West Seattle Blog
“Cookies have become sophisticated — they’re not just for kids any more.” If you needed permission to eat more cookies, Amanda Nokes of Manderin Cookie Company may just have granted it — provided of course that you are indulging in her freshly-baked and delivered traditional cookies with a twist.
A self-professed “food junkie,” Amanda creates recipes in her head that combine the perfect balance of sweet and salty flavors and textures. She adds caramel to the peanut butter cookie and dried cherries to the oatmeal raisin cookie. Her next cookie creation tentatively called “Bean’s Kitchen Sink Cookie” will combine goldfish crackers with vanilla Oreo cookies, butterscotch chips and malted milk balls. She says, “I love desserts and want to find new ways to deliver them to my thighs.”
All her cookies are given family names — “Bean” is her daughter’s nickname and son Max has his own mega-chocolate cookie: “The Max.”
Amanda’s cookie venture began a year and a half ago as something to do while looking for work.
She runs the business out of her West Seattle home and rents commercial kitchen space in the High Point Community Center to bake large batches of cookies. In three days, she can turn around an order of cookies for large corporate gatherings or a group of gift baskets.
Amanda currently does the baking on the side while holding a full-time job, but says she’d like to expand the cookie venture. She says she’s in discussion with Diva Espresso about placing her cookies with them; “Liddy Diddys” and “BeeRoos” could be appearing in Diva locations by the end of the year. To facilitate this regular baking schedule, she’d like to find a commercial kitchen space that she can rent on a more regular basis to avoid the high fees of the hourly rentals.
Cookie orders can be placed on Amanda’s website manderincookieco.com, where Amanda has written all the deliciously descriptive text herself. Such as this from the description of the “Crazy Love” cookie: “Remember your first love? …Crazy Love cookies will leave you with those tummy tingles you once adored so much.” She says these “reflect who I am and how I speak.” One thing you won’t find on the website, but you can order if you’re local, is the Brownie Bar. What’s the big deal about the Brownie Bar? According to Amanda, this brownie is “DENSE, with cayenne, peanut butter, bacon crumbles and ganache on top.” That’s the big deal about this Brownie Bar.
Amanda makes a point of sourcing local ingredients such as Theo’s Chocolate and using local dairies. She feels it’s important to support smaller, local businesses. And in case you wondered – her cookies aren’t organic or gluten-free because that’s not her niche.
Ultimately, Amanda says she’d like to “open a small storefront with a walk-up cookie window with ice cream sandwiches!” Asked if she has a favorite cookie, Amanda says she’ll think of a cookie and say it’s her favorite, but when she’s eating them, “They’re ALL my favorite!”
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