So what do you do with an English degree? If you’re Marci Messick, you bake cookies, cupcakes, mandelbrod and rugelach.
With bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University and Salisbury University under her belt, Messick, 60, taught English at local colleges and penitentiaries. She also worked as a professional writer and editor.
A Baltimore native who grew up at Temple Oheb Shalom, she now works at Baltimore Hebrew Congregation as b’nai mitzvah coordinator. After getting married and raising two sons, Messick learned to bake. Friends started asking her to bake cookies for their children’s birthdays, cupcakes for b’nai mitzvah and cakes for family weddings. Today, she’s up to her kichel in orders with her side business, Just So Sweet!
Jmore: Have you always been a cook and baker?
MM: I never really learned how to cook or was interested in it until I got married and had kids. That’s when I started. I baked custards and flans and took them to parties. I became known in some circles as ‘the Flan lady.’
When COVID hit and we were all working from home, I had more time on my hands and started baking bread. I discovered the King Arthur Flour website, where every week they posted a new bread or pastry recipe, often from somewhere else in the world. That kept my interest and became a fun challenge.
From there, I moved into cake making and decorating. I practiced making different icings and fillings, practiced building layers and keeping them straight — practiced, practiced, practiced. I texted my neighbors several times a week to come over and get plates full of the usually imperfect-but-tasty results.
One of the ironies of all this is that I’m diabetic, so I really don’t eat many sweets myself. And the sweets I do like are things like pavlova, desserts with fruit and cream, not so much the cookies and cakes I bake for other people.
Why did you shift from baking for fun to baking for profit?
Baking was the way I relaxed. To me, baking was like meditation. I didn’t want to lose that. I had no desire to sell what I made. It seemed like that would take all the fun out of it.
But when my husband lost his job in January of 2022, I decided I needed to make some extra money, and at that moment baking seemed like a way to do it. I put the word out on Facebook, and immediately my friends started ordering things. Pretty soon, I was overloaded. I was in shock at how many people wanted my stuff!
And then one day several months later, I brought some things I’d baked to work, and someone said, ‘You know, no one eats that store-bought dreck we put out for onegs. Would you consider baking for us?’ And I’ve been doing that ever since.
I get a lot of orders now from congregants and visitors. Generally, I’ll make whatever people want as long as I know that I can do it without a lot of trial and error and experimentation. I just don’t have the time for that right now.
You work at your ‘real job’ all week, and most of your orders are for weekends. So when do you actually bake?
All the time. I use weekends to bake cookies and even certain kinds of cakes. I flash-freeze them and later in the week, as the order date approaches, I build the [cake] layers, ice and decorate the products. And then shortly before I deliver them, I arrange them on trays and platters.
Does your business have a name?
Once people knew I wanted to start my own small business, everyone suggested a name — the most often suggested name was Sweet Cheeks, which I totally rejected!
I was talking with some colleagues one day, and one said — about something else — ‘That’s just so sweet!’ And there it was: Just So Sweet!
Do you need a vendor’s license or health department inspections, etc.?
If I were selling to retail establishments — grocery stores, restaurants — then I’d need to be licensed. And everything I use has to be ‘shelf stable’ — that means no fresh fruit and certain dairy products.
But beyond that, as long as I’m working directly with the end users, I’m OK.
What are you working on right now?
Three events this weekend — 200 chocolate, vanilla and snickerdoodle cupcakes for a Shabbat dinner; trays of scones, mini coffee cakes, mandelbrod, kichel and cookies for Saturday’s oneg; and 50 s’mores cupcakes for a Saturday night event around a campfire.
Do you still enjoy the work?
Not all of it. Cookies and mandelbrod and those sorts of things are a mainstay of what people want, but frankly making them is pretty boring and monotonous. And I used to have time for weekend lunches with friends, that sort of thing. Not in months! By Sunday night, I’m exhausted.
I do still like to make cakes. They’re just much more interesting. I like the mixing, watching the pieces come together. And no matter what I’m making, I enjoy seeing and admiring the finished product.
So what’s in it for you?
People love sweets, and it just makes me really happy to know that my baking makes people happy, gives them pleasure. It just makes me feel like I’m doing something special.
For information about Just so Sweet!, call 410-916-2312 or visit facebook.com/profile.php?id=100087453745505.
Jonathan Shorr is a local freelance writer.
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