Life is short; eat dessert first

Excerpts taken from The Carmel Pine Cone feature article

By Lisa Crawford Watson

Carolyn Walter’s growing-up family had a tendency to rush through dinner to get to dessert.  Particularly if it involved chocolate. As she grew older, she got over that. These days, she just eats dinner earlier, so dessert doesn’t wait. 

Nowadays, nobody needs to wait for fresh, hot-out-of-the-oven, homemade cookies. For nine years, Walter has been stirring up the cookie dough from family recipes, rolling it into balls, and freezing it, so customers can pop it into a heated oven and bake their own cookies, any time they want dessert. 

Although she established ‘Carolyn’s Cookies” in July 2010, the Salinas resident says it all began in 2008. Walter and her husband, entrepreneur Gary Walter, penciled out a business plan. And then she got busy in the kitchen.  By 2010, she was ready to roll out the dough. 

As soon as Walter had confirmed the concept and a personal commitment to her cookie business, a commercial kitchen became available in Monterey. She pulled out a chocolate chip cookie recipe from her sister, plus recipes for a couple other favorite flavors, and began baking. She introduced her product to the community by selling fresh-baked cookies and packages of frozen dough at local farmers markets. 

“My sister’s chocolate-chip cookie recipe is amazing” Walter said. “It has just the right balance of ingredients, creating a quality that makes you need a second cookie.”

Today, Walter relies primarily on family recipes when baking her signature cookies, and says she owes the success of her snickerdoodle cookies to her late mother-in-law’s recipe. Yet, her popular double chocolate sea salt and her peanut butter chocolate chunk recipes are her own.

She uses only natural ingredients and no preservatives. By sourcing as many local, natural ingredients as possible, she says she’s bringing the farm-to-table movement to the world of cookies.