AUSTINTOWN — When Jennifer Bacha made cutout cookies for her daughter’s birthday in 2017, she never thought she’d have her own store five years later, but Bacha Cookies Bakery just opened its doors in Austintown.
She got the idea to make strawberry party cookies on Pinterest. If you ask Bacha, a self-proclaimed perfectionist, they didn’t look very good, but they were a hit with everyone else.
After that party, she started getting orders from friends. She soon got a full-time job as an in-house photographer for a company, took photos of events on the side, and had a kitchen full of cookies. It was at that moment that Bacha decided to make cookies her full-time job.
“It just snowballed,” Bacha said. “He accelerated so quickly.”
Bacha was always passionate about art. Her mother is an artist, and she described her father as MacGyver.
She wanted to learn photography in high school, but she didn’t have a camera. Her parents gave her a camera as a graduation present when she went to pursue a bachelor’s degree in fine arts at Youngstown State University.
While she may not take as much photography as she used to, Bacha said this skill has really helped her grow her business because she can take good product photos and design visually appealing cookies.
“I think back to some of my first art classes like 2D art and color theory when I’m mixing colors and deciding what designs to make,” Bacha said.
Her artistic background helped her learn this new skill, which she did without any formal training. Her cookies included watercolor, hand-drawn images, airbrush, stencils and sugar glaze, all of which she taught herself.
She said she kept tweaking her recipes and techniques for the first two to three years until she got it right. Bacha still likes to experiment and learn new techniques, but five years later, she knows what works for her business.
Over the last few years of working in her kitchen, Bacha has acquired a stable customer base. She has made cookies for a variety of events, such as the 100th birthday party, the Governor’s and YSU events. One customer buys cookies for almost every holiday and sends them to family members in the Netherlands.
She started looking for a storefront about two years ago, but she and her husband couldn’t find anything that felt right. One day, her husband was driving by 6520 Mahoning Avenue and saw a ‘For Rent’ sign. After the first visit, Bacha knew it was perfect.
“Since I moved here, I’ve fallen in love with my house all over again,” she said. “This business has long outgrown my home kitchen.”
Now that she has a storefront, Bacha is thinking about expanding her recipes. Most of her orders are decorated sugar cookies, but she also makes large chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal raisin cookies, double chocolate and chunky peanut butter cookies.
Right now, she’s only taking custom orders, but she said she hopes to expand soon to have customers come in, at least a few days a week. She said family comes first and she doesn’t want to put her family under stress all the time.
Her family helped her through the entire process of learning this new skill, and then also in creating a career. From bagging cookies to babysitting her daughter to cleaning the building, which used to be a cat shelter, everyone in her family played a role in creating the storefront. Bacha and her husband, Chris, even had to demolish something.
“(My husband) was my rock,” Bacha said. He is the one who believed in me and believed in my ability as a cookie artist to achieve this dream of owning a cake shop. He is the man behind the woman.”
Bacha said she always wants to encourage others who are thinking about learning, but to “never forget the customers. If you respect the customer, the customer comes back to you.”
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