Lauren Berry peels delicate edible flowers off their pressing sheets and sorts them into envelopes. The owner of sweet botanical bakes, a one-woman small business producing artisanal shortbread cookies, handles the wafer-thin purple and yellow violas with the same exacting care and passion she applies to every step of her process.
The idea for starting a baked goods business came from a baking-sheet-sized “pop tart” complete with homemade raspberry jam and the signature holes that Berry made for a potluck dinner. Her shortbread cookies were the result of brainstorming and careful research. “I really like making food, and cookies bring joy,” explains Berry. “I wanted something that was shelf stable enough that I could ship.” Berry, an avid gardener, used her own garden as inspiration for her first cookie recipes, and still grows all her own edible flowers and herbs. “At first every cookie had some floral element. It was on top or in the cookie itself like the Lemon Lavender cookie,” recalls Berry. Her first creation, the Garden Party Shortbread, utilizes sugar gel glaze to seal her pressed flowers to the top of the scalloped-edge cookies. A mix of nasturtium, pansy, chive blossom, borage, dianthus, viola, marigold, and geranium makes the cookies a treat for the eyes even before you take a rich, buttery bite.
While most of the cookies are traditionally sweet, Berry loves a savory cookie. A recent recipe, the Mexican Street Corn (Elote) Shortbread, contains a masa harina and Indian Head cornmeal base. “I wanted a corn cookie, and I didn’t know if it was going to be caramel popcorn or a cheesy flavor. I went full savory, and it’s awesome. I couldn’t really dress it up, so I just torched the top. It gives it a little bit of a smokiness,” says Berry. Other savory cookies include a Cheesy Creole, Balsamic Fig Pepitas, and an Everything But the Bagel cookie.
Berry is fastidious when it comes to sourcing ingredients for her cookies and sources locally as much as possible. She uses an 82 percent butterfat imported European butter, fresh eggs from local Boston area farms, flour from King Arthur Baking Company from Vermont, and spices from Curio Spice Co. in Cambridge. Her vanilla extract? She makes that from scratch. The Garden Party and about five other varieties come in a gluten-free version. Her kitchen in Medford, Massachusetts, can also accommodate nut-free orders.
Through her website Berry sells and hand-packages her cookies in 6- and 12-packs per order with floral and/or seasonal wrapping paper and a handwritten note on a letterpress card (customers provide the message) for gifting. She can accommodate preorders for six months out for a one-stop shop gifting experience. The Quarterly Cookies subscription includes three different shortbread flavors (six-packs of each) delivered once per quarter.
Larger custom orders for parties, wedding favors, and corporate events come in quantities of 100, 150, and 300 cookies. Berry works with customers to match a specific color palette or event theme. Always up for experimentation, Berry will create custom cookies such as a Honeycomb cookie she created for a bridal shower, sourcing the honey from Carlisle Honey.
Berry partners with local designers, wedding vendors, and florists to create a curated shopping experience for popup events and markets such as the SoWa Christmas Market in Boston, where she’ll return this year. While her first holiday market booth offered only three varieties, this year she is planning three limited holiday varieties in addition to her year-round flavors. The bestseller Sweater Weather, a sweet spice cookie with ginger, cardamom, and clove, will return, as will House of Ginger, a ginger molasses cookie with some heat on the back end from Togarashi, a textured Japanese spice blend. The third limited-edition holiday cookie will be new this year.
Berry is also passionate about giving back to her community and included that in her business plan. From the beginning, Sweet Botanical Bakes has donated 5 percent of all purchases to community gardens and seed preservation efforts. Her favorite cookie is the Café Limón, an unexpected duo of espresso and citrus featuring La Colombe Coffee Roasters and a Curio Spice Da Lat spice blend. The scalloped-edge brown cookies are topped with viola flowers. “I always like dabbling in something new and funky and experimenting. I love taking something I love and asking if I can turn this into a cookie,” says Berry.