For 20 years, Cake Chef in Westerleigh, Staten Island has been serving up a variety of baked goods - including pies, cookies, special occasion cakes and its signature apple crumb horseshoe.
Chef James Carrozza creates the confections while his wife Maria manages the bakery.
Success has been sweet - in fact too sweet - and over the years the couple struggled to meet the demand in their tiny kitchen.
“Our cake business started to grow and so on the weekends we would stop production on the cookies,” said Maria Carrozza. “Saturday we were so busy making and filling all of the cake orders for the weekends, that our customers would walk in and there won't be any cookies.”
The Carrozzas could not expand at their current location and did not want to relocate at the risk of loosing longtime customers.
So in December, they opened another bakery just a mile down the road in West Brighton, called Cake Chef's Cookie Jar.
A successful family-owned Staten Island bakery met a growing customer demand by creating a side-venture in cookies. Shazia Khan has more.
“Because we're not making 100 different items like birthday cakes, wedding cakes, donuts, danishes, we're just making cookies,” said James Carrozza. “We're able to devote all our time to making different varieties of cookies.”
In fact, more than 100 varieties of cookies are baked in the spacious, new kitchen. The Carrazzos say the Cookie Jar doesn't compete with Cake Chef, it complements it.
“A lot of people who come into this store - I would say maybe 50 percent of the people - don't even know where the original Cake Chef is, so we're targeting a new audience,” said James Carrazzo.
And now when Cake Chef is short on cookies, their customers can just head over to Cookie Jar to satisfy their cravings.
“We don't compete with them as far as cakes,” said Maria Carrozza. “We have a great selection of cookies here as well as our dream to always have a little café-type of place where you can come in a sit down with your loved one, have a cappuccino and a couple of cookies and just enjoy the nice music.”
Since the late 1980s, James Carrozza has been collecting cookie jars, and at one time had more than 1,000 in his collection. Today, he displays and sells them at Cake Chef's Cookie Jar.
The Carrozza’s cookie doesn’t crumble, but instead creates a successful diversification of their bakery business.