LINCOLN CITY, Ore. — Food has always been Whitney Bickle’s passion, but before she even knew it, baking was her first love.
“Some of my earliest and most comforting memories to this date are stealing cookie dough out of the bowl when my mother was not paying attention,” Whitney Bickle said.
Pre-pandemic, Bickle was on her way to a culinary career in fine dining, but that all changed when restaurants closed because of the coronavirus.
“I thought that my life was kind of coming to an end. It definitely felt like the world as we knew it had," she said.
Feeling depressed and unsure of what the future would hold, she says she was in a funk. She worried if there would be a place for her to come back to in the restaurant industry.
So, she turned to the kitchen for a little baking therapy and whipped up a buttery, peanut butter masterpiece.
“I got really lucky and a wild moment of creativity led to a very, very good sandwich cookie,” she said.
Two perfect peanut butter cookies with a soft, airy center makes up her Nutter Better cookie.
“What I call nut fluff and it’s sort of like the Nutter Butters you would see in the grocery store, but very gourmet and a lot better butter,” she said, giggling at the pun.
Bickle sent out a big batch to family and friends, but word quickly spread on social media and her baking therapy turned into a full-blown cookie delivery business called Butter Bakes.
Bickle, along with some help from her boyfriend, makes about 200 cookies a week. They’re all made by hand in her home test kitchen in Lincoln City. She sells and delivers her homemade treats to people in her area, many of whom can’t leave their homes because of the pandemic.
“If I couldn’t do anything else – I could bake,” she said, “I’m not the most articulate, I’m not the best at helping in any sense, but I can bake. And I realize if I bake something good,it makes people smile," she said.
From the Nutter Better to sweet molasses cookies, she’s giving old-school recipes an overhaul with fewer preservatives, better ingredients and some new flavor.
“It’s 1960s, 1950s, 1940s cookie recipes and beyond with the cravings of a would-be hipster millennial, I guess,” she described her baking style.
Because Bickle bakes her cookies out of her home, she can only deliver her treats locally. She brought Butter Bakes to her first farmer’s market in Lincoln City Sunday and hopes to expand to more farmer's markets in the future.
Cookies have always been her passion, but she found her opportunity for entrepreneurship in a pandemic.
“I think it’s really important that we share that home baked love because it is possible to bake the world a better place,” Bickle said.