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Janet Marshall’s new business, Yellow Rose Cookie Shoppe, combines the celebrations of life’s special moments along with some nostalgia.
Marshall started the cottage food business in September 2022 after she began baking sugar cookies, first as a way to combat boredom and then as a business, after her personally decorated creations were a hit at her son’s wedding.
Her journey into baking cookies first began when she was a young girl growing up on the family farm near Raymond, Minnesota.
Marshall recalls her mother making various cookies, bars and cakes while her father worked the fields.
She expanded her knowledge through extracurricular activities.
“I was in 4-H, and foods were the project that I was in,” she said.
Decades later, her own children, Ethan and Erica, were also in the 4-H foods project, where she often helped the youngsters complete projects for the Rock County Fair.
Years later, Marshall’s thoughts returned to baking special creations after announcing her retirement from Berkley Technology Services, Luverne, in late 2021. Months later the state was engulfed in the coronavirus pandemic.
“I was looking for something to do to occupy my time while in lockdown,” she said. “I then came across a sugar cookie group on Facebook.”
The group featured pictures of beautifully decorated cookies made for all different occasions.
Her son’s recent engagement sparked the idea to create sugar cookies for the couple’s July 2022 nuptials.
“That was my goal – to get myself where I could make nice personal cookies for their wedding,” Marshall said. “That’s what I did. I worked on it.”
Through the social media site, Marshall found recipes for a basic sugar cookie recipe and how to make royal icing.
For weeks she studied videos and viewed pictures on Pinterest as she mastered working with royal icing, which is critical to cookie decorating.
“Something I have learned over time doing these is if my icing would not flow nicely, just go back and remix it,” she said. “It is worth the time doing than just fighting through it.”
Designs are first sketched out on notebook paper, where she carefully notes colors and icing thicknesses.
Through the spring and early summer of 2022, Marshall worked on mastering her decorating techniques that included air brushing and a projector to help with the decorative writing.
“Sometimes I have a hard time falling asleep because I’m thinking about how I am going to do this — thinking about designs,” she said.
Soon friends noticed her work and began asking Marshall to create personal cookies for bridal showers, birthdays or baby showers.
While thinking she should start her own business, Marshall baked and decorated 175 sugar cookies for her son’s wedding, ultimately creating several different designs. Each cookie was individually packaged.
Two months after the wedding, Marshall officially opened Yellow Rose Cookie Shoppe, named in honor of her late mother.
“My mom and I shared a birthday in June,” she said. “We had wild yellow roses, and they always bloomed on our birthday. In her cards she always wrote, “The yellow roses are blooming.”
Marshall specializes in the traditional sugar cookie flavor but can make lemon, pumpkin spice, confetti, apple cider, chocolate chip, M&M and chocolate brownie sugar cookies.
Her social media site says she “makes custom decorated sugar cookies to help celebrate special moments in your life!”
She is registered as a cottage food business through the Minnesota Department of Agriculture and, as a result, sells directly to customers through her social media site, Yellow Rose Cookie Shoppe. Her base price is $36 for a dozen cookies.
As a sole proprietor, Marshall sets her own hours.
“The beauty of it is, if it works in my schedule I will do it. If not, I can say ‘no’,” she said.
For various holidays, Marshall creates several appropriate designs she offers for sale to the public.
For the upcoming Valentine’s Day, she’s created special two cookie sets as well as single cookies, much like she did for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
She’s also created a football stadium involving 15 cookies in honor of the upcoming Super Bowl.
Her husband, Eugene, used to be the taste tester in the family. Now Marshall relies on other family members and friends as cookie testers.
“My future son-in-law likes sugar cookies, so he gets to eat some cookies I’m working on,” Marshall said.
No doubt, the upcoming wedding will have special cookies completed by Marshall at her Yellow Rose Cookie Shoppe.