COPLEY TOWNSHIP, Ohio _ Roxane Trust loves the way cookies spread joy.
And she'll even deliver a bit of that happiness right to your door.
Trust runs Bake at 350 Bakery, a home-based business that specializes in cookies that taste as good as they look. She delivers them in her vintage Volkswagen minibus, which this time of year is decked out with greenery, a miniature silver tree on the dashboard and a Barbie in the back window, holding a tiny cookie.
"I think cookies make people happy. They're nostalgic," Trust said. And it's a rare person who doesn't love some sort of cookie. In fact, she's made that concept her motto: "There's a cookie for everyone."
Trust is a nurse by profession and a baker by passion. She learned baking at her mom's elbow and perfected her cookie-making and decorating skills just by playing around, until she got so good at it that she started putting her co-workers to shame in their annual cookie exchange.
Her sister, Valerie Trust, urged her to turn her hobby into a business. Sadly, Valerie didn't get to see that dream come to fruition. She died in 2013, two years before Trust started Bake at 350.
Trust still works part time at the Cleveland Clinic, but it's cookie-making that feeds her creative side.
Her cookies _ particularly her decorated cutouts _ are miniature works of art. She's decorated cookies to look like Peanuts characters, her orange VW bus and even a page from a storybook, complete with picture and tiny text. For Christmas, she makes the usual Santas and trees, but she also creates leg lamps and likenesses of Ralphie in his pink bunny pajamas from A Christmas Story.
There's just something special about having an embellished cookie all to yourself, she said. It's not like a decorated cake, which is beautiful as a whole but unremarkable to look at once it's sliced.
"When you get a cookie, everybody gets a Santa Claus. Everybody gets a bus. Every girl gets a Cinderella dress," she said. "This way, everybody gets their own design."
Trust's interest in baking borders on obsession. Multiple drawers in her kitchen are devoted just to cookie cutters. She has every decorating supply imaginable, from decorating markers and holographic glitter to a printer that produces edible images.
Although decorated sugar cookies are her signature item, she makes other kinds of cookies, too _ old favorites like chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies, ethnic specialties such as Russian tea cakes and kolachis and even decadent French shortbread cookies drenched in chocolate.
Her cookies look beautiful on a plate, but what really sets them apart is the flavor. She uses natural ingredients, so you can taste butter or vanilla or almond.
"They are good. They're not just pretty to look at," she said.
In fact, that's one of the reasons she started her business. She got tired of bakery cookies that looked delicious but tasted like they came from a box.
Trust has baked cookies for weddings, baby showers and birthdays. She created 450 cookies in four days for performances of Beauty and the Beast at the Akron Civic Theatre, decorated with the characters' images. Last Christmas she ran a pop-up shop at Crocker Park in Westlake with help from her sons, Morgan and Alonzo, but that experience convinced her she wanted to keep her focus closer to home.
After all, she has a goal: "I'd like to become the household name for cookies in Akron," she said.
That's not just for practical reasons. Trust also likes the personal touch she can maintain by serving a limited geographic area rather than just shipping her creations off to faceless customers across the country.
"I want to make contact with people," she said. "I want to form relationships with people. ... I'm old-fashioned. I really am."
Just like her made-from-scratch cookies.
