Lisa Piekutowski’s new Sifted and Sweet shop will open by early December, offering the cookies and pies she’s been selling from her home for the past five years. (Photo/Nancy Hanson.)

Decorated cookies are one of Lisa Piekutowski’s specialties, She has offered several decorating classes this fall.

Nancy Edmonds Hanson

Sometime over the next two weeks, baker extraordinaire Lindsay Piekutowski will be serving up something sweet in south Moorhead – a shop sure to brighten mornings with the aroma of fresh-baked rolls and freshly brewed coffee.
The Sifted and Sweet Baking Company will open soon in the space formerly occupied by Altony’s Italian Restaurant, Lindsay confirmed this week. “All that I’m waiting for is my commercial food license from the Department of Agriculture and the state inspection,” she says. “I’d hoped to open in October. But everything takes longer than you expect.”
The shop will be worth the wait. Lindsay has been delighting online customers with the premium products of her kitchen for exactly five years. When that license arrives, she’ll realize a dream she shares with husband Brad: Selling her exquisite cookies and cakes from a bricks-and-mortar shop of their own … and getting her enterprise out of their 950-square-foot home and into the public.
“I’ve always baked,” Lindsay says, “ever since I was 4. Molasses cookies were my favorite, but mom didn’t feel like making them one day. I pestered my mother until she showed me how to bake them myself.”
But her first career path took her far from the oven. After graduating from the University of Minnesota Duluth, she taught English in the Twin Cities and Grand Rapids, Minnesota. After meeting her husband Brad online, they married; she moved here to his home town. For the last seven years, she has taught English-language learners. “I did love it,” she reflects, “but after a dozen years in the classroom, it was time to move on.
“I always wanted to start a bookstore or a bakery, and here I am.”
Even while teaching teens by day, the self-described introvert spent hours in the evenings indulging her love of baking: “It was so different from what I was doing all day. Teaching requires a lot of mental effort. After a busy day, I’d drive home in complete silence. The physical part of baking was just what I needed.”
And she was devouring TV cooking programs, especially “The Great British Baking Show.” She declared,“If they can do all these complicated things, so can I!”
That was November 2019. She posted an invitation to order her baked cinnamon-apple doughnuts on Facebook, and customers began to roll in. Then came cookies, her first love – more orders. Licensed by Minnesota as a cottage food producer, Sifted and Sweet began to soar. “I was doing it for fun,” she confesses. “I baked whatever I wanted to bake. Then I realized how much I like decorating cookies, and it took of from there.”
Thus began her double life. “I knew getting word out was the biggest challenge,” she remembers. She signed up for every craft and vendor sale she could find. That meant that, four days a week, she’d come home from school to her kitchen, then spend the next four or five hours mixing, baking and decorating eye-catching cookies. “Then I’d be up until 3 or 4 Saturday morning getting ready the show that day.”
Lindsay’s menu of baked treats grew. Calling herself “not a great cake maker,” she mastered that art; now she says she’s proud of them. She moved on to macarons, “a huge pain to figure out.” Her colorful frosted cookies offered a delectable canvas for her imagination.
But it was hot cocoa bombs that truly launched her business. “Remember the hot cocoa bomb craze of 2020 and 2021? It was a huge craze everywhere,” she notes. She used her own cocoa blend for the bombs, chocolate spheres filled with the mix and mini marshmallows that virtually exploded in hot mil or water. “That was when I really started getting out there. People were lining up for my hot cocoa bombs, and then buying everything else, too.”
It was three years after she’d begun her home bakery when Lindsay began, as she says, “obsessing about a bakery.” She found the empty pizza and spaghetti space at 800 Holiday Drive last summer. Since then, she has recruited another baker, a cook and a cake decorator. She is still looking for a barista to serve customers both inside and at the shop’s drive-up window.
Lindsay envisions not only a cheerful neighborhood bakery but a friendly spot for breakfast and lunch. Along with a bakery case full of pies, cheesecake, rolls, cakes and – of course – cookies, she plans to offer breakfast, coffee and lunch. She’ll introduce a limited menu of breakfast and lunch choices – breakfast sandwiches and yogurt with granola to start the day, perhaps, along with cinnamon and caramel rolls; and, at lunch, soups, sandwiches, salads and pasties, the turnover-like Finnish hand pies filled with vegetables and ground meat.
Those pasties won’t be all that has an authentic Finnish flavor. “I’m about 99% Finn and maybe 1% Swede,” she confesses. Along with pasties, her plans include pulla (cardamom bread) and mustikka piirakkja (a creamy blueberry pie).
But there’s more. Lindsay has already begun sharing her passion for frosting with cookie decorating classes. Her first, with a Thanksgiving theme, was a hit last week. A planned Christmas session sold out in a week; she added a second that also was fully booked in days. The next, the sporty Big Game Cookie Class, is coming up Jan. 25.
“I’d love to offer more classes, but I won’t have enough room here. Maybe someday,” she suggests. With more space, she’d also consider a commercial rental kitchen for other producers along with expanded retail space. “I’d love to make this a sort of baking mecca.”
In the meantime, she is planning more special events in her new quarters. “I want to do English tea service and ‘dessert night outs,’” she promises. “My husband and I like doing things together. We could hang out in the evening and serve special desserts.”
For now, she’s putting finishing touches on her shop, waiting for that license to come from the state, and keeping up with custom baking for her faithful followers. “I couldn’t have done this without them,” she emphasizes. “It’s great knowing I have an audience.
For more information on Lindsay’s pies, cake and cookies, as well as news of classes and her upcoming opening, go to www.siftedandsweet.com.