Custom Cookies and More at Sugar & Flour Bakery Café

by

Harold Crick, Will Ferrell’s character in the 2006 movie Stranger Than Fiction, had to be convinced to try a good scratch-made cookie. For everyone else, cookies are the ultimate comfort treat of which we can’t get enough.

Karen Herrera, who co-owns Sugar & Flour Bakery Café (5721 Broad St., Greendale) with her husband, George, recognized more than a decade ago that there was a growing demand for personalized and custom decorated cookies. As a professional baker turned stay-at-home mom, she began crafting cookies shaped and artistically decorated with colorful icings to resemble hot air balloons, animals, butterflies, the moon, cars, sports themes, sailboats and almost any other shape or design her customers might desire.

She sold cookies through Etsy and worked out of bakery kitchen space in the Third Ward. At the time, George had worked for Hyatt Hotels as executive chef and food and beverage director. While driving home from work one day, Karen noticed a vacant spot among the Historic Downtown Greendale shops that was formerly occupied by Kathy’s Village Pizza.

“We started by renting a retail space,” Karen says. “I made cookies just a few days a week and kept my online business going. We had grown enough to where I needed to hire a couple of people.”

George later left his position at Hyatt. “Working for a big corporation for 20-plus years was a great learning experience, but I had grown as far as I could,” he said. He joined Karen at Sugar & Flour and developed a breakfast and lunch menu. In 2017, they added the café.

Cookies for Every Occasion

Sugar & Flour’s breakfast menu features several options including Apple Butter French Toast, the Breakfast B.E.T. (bacon, egg and tomato) Sandwich or a Protein Power Bowl. Lunch choices include Monte Cristo, Open-faced Portabella or Pot Roast on Baguette. Most sandwiches are served with chips. Salad choices include Chicken Ranch, the WisCOBBsin, with grilled chicken, avocado and white cheese curds, or the Harvest. There’s also a soup of the day.

A rotating selection of cookies is based on seasonal flavors and ingredients; this summer, look for their s’mores’ cookies. Popular mainstays available every day are gluten-free chocolate chip, chocolate chip peanut butter and salted brown butter cookies, and brownies. Sugar & Flour’s chocolate chunk cookie is made from Karen’s mother’s recipe. Karen notes most recipes they use were “found here and there or picked up along the way, but majority of them were developed by them.

Bakery items include homemade breads and breakfast pastries like croissants, chocolate croissants and morning buns. Some items are available during specific days of week according to what they want to try. “If we see something that looks like fun, we’ll try it. One of the benefits of having a small business is that we can make whatever we want,” Karen says.

Custom specialty cookies are still a large component of the business. Customers can order decorated sugar cookies for graduations, baby or bridal showers, holidays and corporate events. “If somebody calls and says they’re having a baby shower, they can bring us a picture of the invitation and we can make cookies to go with the theme of the party,” Karen says. They’ve recently made basketball themed and corporate logo cookies for a Downtown Milwaukee business to celebrate the Milwaukee Bucks playoffs.

“And we also did the best holiday of this week—May 4,” George adds, referencing May the Fourth Be With You, the day Star Wars fans took a variant of the catchphrase “May the force be with you” to celebrate the movie franchise. Sugar & Flour had an array of Star Wars themed cookies. Karen says they use an edible imaging printer to make custom designs and pictures.

Karen and George love the flexibility of being small business owners and how it allows for a work-life balance. They enjoy getting to know the Greendale community and are excited to see it develop further as a destination city.

For more information, visit sugarandflourcookies.com.