A passion for cooking leads to island bakery

Postmaster, preschool treasurer, school board chair, library trustee, coordinator of grocery deliveries and telemedicine services, wife, mother of two; it would seem Marissa Rozenski of Frenchboro has enough job titles. But she added "bakery owner" to her list of duties when she opened up the Frenchboro Bakery and Island Candy Shop, a mostly online purveyor of chocolates, cookies, and other sweets.

Now starting her second summer (she opened in August 2008), the bakery merely an extension of what Rozenski has been doing for years. Part of a long line of Italian cooks, Rozenski has a compulsion to feed people. "I'll have 40 people at my house for the holidays and enough food for 120," she says.

She constantly entertains her fellow islanders and usually has a houseful of mouths to feed. Eventually, she decided her hobby was becoming too expensive to continue and that she had to stop or figure out how to make some money from it.  "If I lived somewhere bigger," she says, "I would probably have done something more commercial, like a restaurant." The bakery was a compromise. She didn't want to charge her fellow islanders ("It would be like charging family") so instead she took her goods online.

"I have to cook. I need to cook," explains Rozenski, "It's better that I cook all this for other people than for myself." Rozenski illustrates her point by describing a day when she had a sudden craving to make cinnamon rolls.  "I woke up and my fingers said, ‘It's a dough day.' I made six batches. There was dough rising everywhere and a big smile on my face, when I realized that I couldn't possibly eat it all." So she started calling around the island for assistance. "They were all gone in two hours," she says.

The cinnamon rolls haven't made it to the bakery site yet, but other orders have been rolling in. Rozenski's original hope was that the business would simply pay for itself, a goal she reached much sooner than she expected.

Uncomfortable with aggressive marketing, Rozenski originally allowed the bakery to grow slowly through word-of-mouth. But when she and the bakery were part of a March segment of The Oprah Winfrey Show about Frenchboro, Rozenski feared that the bakery would snowball out of her control. So far, though business has increased, it remains manageable at an average of 10 orders per week.

"Though it's very uneven," she says, "Some days I'll get 10 orders and then nothing for a week." To help balance out such an uneven workload, Rozenski has even begun considering a few wholesale accounts. "When they first called, I thought, ‘What am I, Willy Wonka?" she laughs. "I like cooking for people and I was worried I would lose that personal touch. But these are small, locally-owned gift shops, so I can pretend I am cooking for the owner."

Working a new business into an already overstuffed life hasn't been easy, and Rozenski is frank about how she manages it. "I pretty much gave up on sleeping," she says. Because she cooks out of her home kitchen, Rozenski prefers to wait until her household is quiet to begin filling orders. "I put the kids to bed, I kick my husband out, I shut the cat away, I sterilize everything, and then I cook."

She is committed to fulfilling on-island orders the same day and mailing out online orders the next. This dedication to prompt service comes at a cost. She is regularly up until 2 or 3 a.m. and one recent day she passed her lobsterman husband on the stairs at 5 a.m. He was getting up; she was going to bed.

The bakery's biggest seller is Rozenski's English Toffee. She also sells handmade truffles, solid or liquor-filled chocolates, classic Italian biscotti, and Maine-themed items such as whoopee pies and lobster-shaped chocolate lollipops. She always considers adding new items, such as those cinnamon rolls, but is cautious about making her menu too extensive. "I don't want to have 150 items available, but I'm not sure I want to rotate either," she explains. She is always happy to accommodate custom orders.

The link to the Frenchboro Bakery is: http://frenchborobakery.com. However, if you find yourself on Frenchboro, you may just want to stop in. Chances are excellent that she will feed you.

Cherie Galyean is a freelance writer who lives in Bar Harbor.