A squeaky door welcomes guests daily to the Red Rooster Cookie Jar, with the smell of fresh-baked, still-warm cookies seeping out of the small house turned into a business.
Yvonne Conti-O’Brien, of the Village of Poinciana, ensured every detail of her Lady Lake bakery was intentional and helps make guests feel at home.
“We want to be a place where people feel like they’re visiting family when they walk through the door,” said Conti-O’Brien, the owner and brains behind the Red Rooster Cookie Jar. “We don’t look like a traditional bakery when you walk through the door and everything I did was for a purpose. We make everything from scratch, no preservatives, and we have all of our cake domes and cookie jars out on the counter. Our curtains look like the red and white gingham curtains at grandma’s house. We have a screen door that purposely squeaks and slams, so it’s just like grandma’s house. Everything is because everybody who comes through that door is like family.”
The bakery, at 107 E. Lady Lake Blvd., is one of the few in Lake and Sumter counties that offers families a place to stop in for a sweet summer treat.
Conti-O’Brien, a former middle school Spanish teacher, said she took on the baking business venture in November 2017, six months after her retirement.
“One day I was moving things around in the kitchen and a chocolate chip cookie recipe fell out onto the counter,” she said. “Now, I hadn’t baked cookies, I didn’t know I could bake and I wasn’t eating cookies. Yet, something told me to bake these cookies after the recipe fell out onto the counter. I baked them and they were awesome.”
After baking for a brief time, Conti-O’Brien started to branch out and explore new flavors by making her own cookie recipes.
“I thought to myself that I needed an oatmeal cookie recipe,” she said. “My son’s girlfriend at the time said, ‘I love when my mom makes oatmeal raisin cookies with chocolate chips.’ I said, ‘Why bother? Why not just use raisinettes, or chocolate-covered raisins?’ I couldn’t find a recipe anywhere, so I created my own. We sell the oatmeal raisinette cookies to this day.”
Another serendipitous event happened at the grocery store.
“I remember that I was almost near the meat section in Winn-Dixie and I felt a tap on my shoulder,” she said. “I turned around and there was nobody there, but on the shelf was a double cinnamon sugar cookie recipe. I took it home and it was just an epic fail. I cried so hard there were puddles on the pan because I just could not get it right no matter what I did. Then I thought, ‘Let me take out an egg.’ I did and that became my snickerdoodle cookies.”
The chocolate chip, oatmeal raisinette and snickerdoodle cookies were the first three Conti-O’Brien shared with the public.
Along with those, people can satisfy their sweet tooth by trying other unique flavors including the salted caramel cashew cookie, the glazed golden apple cookie, the mango cloud cookie, the chocolate coconut cluster and the Mexican wedding cookie.
With over 150 unique cookie recipes, the Red Rooster Cookie Jar gives every cookie its time to shine by featuring a cookie of the week.
Last week’s cookie of the week was the cosmic cookie butter cookie. This week people can order the Key lime vacation cookie and next week is the bourbon peach pie cookie.
“I love, love, love creating new recipes and I look for new ideas all the time,” Conti-O’Brien said. “I was looking at a magazine one time and there was white Russian s’mores. I said, ‘I can make a cookie out of that,’ so, that’s my white Russian caramel cookie. It’s a white chocolate cookie with white chocolate chips. When it comes out of the oven, we top it with mini marshmallows, I glaze it with caramel and sprinkle it with graham cracker crumbs.”
Although it is known for its cookies, the bakery also sells cakes, pies and cheesecakes.
The bakery also sells fresh from the oven cinnamon rolls only on Saturday mornings, starting at 10 a.m.
“Everything we do takes time, because we want people to come back over and over again,” she said. “We don’t make anything that’s over the top, like a cookie that’s the size of your head. I catered to our demographic and what the people in our area want. We make things that people can’t find in other places. I don’t want to compete with anyone, I just want to do things that are different from vintage recipes.”
Nancy Thomas has been baking Conti-O’Brien’s unique sweets for the past two years. Thomas, who has been baking since high school, said the flavors found at the bakery are “phenomenal.”
“It blows my mind how Yvonne can come up with these recipes,” Thomas said.
Conti-O’Brien said she hopes her sweet treats help transport the tasters to a simpler time.
“I want people to remember when they were a child and I want everything we do to invoke memories, so people feel that nostalgia when they bite into whatever we have baked for them,” she said.
For more information about the Red Rooster Cookie Jar, visit rrcookiejar.com.
Miz Kathi’s Southern Sweetery With fun menu items including apple cider donuts, pumpkin cinnamon rolls, spooky coffee and more, Miz Kathi’s Southern Sweetery, 105 N. Main St., Wildwood, hosted a Summerween day on Saturday.
Open since 2008, Miz Kathi’s Southern Sweetery is a vintage Southern bakery known for its specialty cakes, themed desserts and unique iced coffee flavors.
Kristen Dunaway, head baker since 2018, said this is the second year the bakery has brought out the Summerween menu as a way to boost business during the slower summer season.
“We did a Summerween menu last year and it was great,” Dunaway said. “We always try to do different themes. There’s not a huge number of bakeries in the area that are making homemade desserts. I feel that and the menu help make us special.”
The bakery has celebrated many seasons and holidays this year by being creative in the kitchen.
For the Fourth of July, the bakery made a batch of red, white and blue cakes, including a cookie cake.
In celebration of April Fools’ Day, people had the chance to order cakes that would make anyone do a double-take, including the 4-inch pancake stack cake, the chicken nuggets and fries cake and a mini butter cake.
The bakery also creates a new coffee menu every month. For July, the coffee menu features the chocolate chip cookie latte, the tiramisu breve, the brownie batter latte and the maple bacon latte.
Dunaway, whose main job is to decorate the cakes, said people can expect the creativity to continue at the bakery — with some highly anticipated themed menus expected to make a return later this year, including for Gilmore Girls Day in the fall.
To stay up to date with the sweet treats and fun coffee flavors you can find at the Wildwood bakery, visit mksweetery.com.
Staff writer Brea Jones can be reached at 352-753-1119, ext. 5414, or brea.jones@thevillagesmedia.com.
