Meet Ellie

The name isn't clever branding. Ellie is my first name, Mae is my middle name, and I came up with it in pastry school for an assignment where we wrote a proposal for a bakery we'd open someday. Mine was hypothetical at the time. Apparently I meant it.

I actually started college planning to teach culinary classes in schools. I loved the food side so much that by the end of my degree I realized I didn't want the classroom, I wanted the kitchen. So I finished my degree, went to pastry school, and moved to Florida the second I graduated. No job lined up. Just a very strong feeling.

I landed at a large Tampa bakery and spent four years there learning how a real production kitchen runs. Hundreds of cakes and cookies a week, all of them expected to look identical. It taught me how to work at scale and hit a deadline, which is the part nobody sees but every order depends on. Later I helped open a private club as their pastry chef, making plated desserts and building dessert tables for member events. Different world, same lesson.

Then I had my kids, and for a few years that was the whole job. Being their mom is still the biggest part of my life.

The custom cookie thing started almost by accident. I kept seeing decorated sugar cookies online and finally texted a friend who was throwing a party for her daughter and asked if I could make her cookies for free, just to try it. Everyone was so impressed. I look back at photos of those cookies now and they were rough. But you have to start somewhere, and nobody had taught me that skill in any kitchen or any classroom. I taught myself, watched everything I could find, and slowly the free favors turned into real orders.

For a while I was doing both. Working full-time and squeezing in custom orders on the side, mostly at night after the kids went to bed. Then the orders stopped being occasional and started being consistent, and I hit the point where I had to choose: keep building someone else's kitchen or build my own. I chose this. I believe God had a hand in the timing, because it was the decision I'd been quietly working toward since that school assignment.

Ellie Mae's Bakery has been full-time since 2023. What started with custom celebration cookies now includes printed logo cookies, corporate gifting, cake pops, shipped orders, private events, cookie decorating classes, and a live cookie photo booth that prints guests' photos onto cookies right at their event.

I still do all of it myself. Every inquiry, design, batch, box, and delivery.