Like many locals, Roz Mazur is a regular at the Sift Bakehouse. She visits the store about three times a week and has a sweet spot for the triple berry scone. “You walk in and you feel like you’re in your mother’s kitchen,” Mazur says. Sift is all about hometown charm. Recipes like the not-so-German chocolate cake are handed down from grandmother and mother, generations of women perfecting these delicacies.

Old kitchenwares swing from the rungs of wooden ladders suspended from the ceiling. On the window ledge there’s a retro kitchen scale that owner Christine Nordstrom traded for a piece of cake. An eclectic mix of cookie cutters covers the walls with every imaginable shape, creating a patchwork display of life in the area, from the state of Florida to a palm tree. The collection has grown to include over 1,200 of the shaped tools used for her hand-decorated cookies. A steady stream of customers walk through the door, and Nordstrom knows every one. She offers each a smile and a story alongside her baked cookies and scones. You can overhear someone say “This is my addiction now” before slipping out the door with a paper bag full of sugar.

SIFTING OUT THE GOOD

While the old-school vibe of the Sift storefront is relatively new, opening in late April of this year, Nordstrom and her desserts are already well known in the region. Her Sugar Shacks, which grace about 16 farmers’ markets each week, are a staple of the area, and she’s provided many a cake for special events and parties. Nordstrom began her culinary career in high school with a chance cookie-decorating contest. While she hadn’t yet planned for a future in baking, she won and was accepted into the school’s program, where she ran the bakery. She then went on to win national competitions for two consecutive years and landed a scholarship to attend Johnson and Wales University. While in college, she earned a bachelor’s degree in culinary business management and became an executive pastry chef at a restaurant. Before Sift, Nordstrom owned two other bakeries, Cakewalk and Whisk, where she learned far more from her failures than she did any success. Even when those businesses didn’t taste as sweet, she continued “walking through the fire,” building her way out of bad business and negative relationships. Here she learned some of her most essential lessons, valuable ones she imparts onto others today, about the importance of personal and professional boundaries and the necessity of being a business person first, and a baker or cook second.

RISING UP

In the summer of 2009, she created her third bakery brand and the first form of solo-endeavor Sift Bakehouse, a pop-up bakery that at the time could only be found at farmers’ markets and catering events. Nordstrom then opened the Rise commercial kitchen in 2011, a culinary space that could be rented out to fellow food-business owners for making their products. The idea for a shared kitchen arose years before, while she was looking for a similar place to start her own bakery business, only needing to use a professional kitchen for a few hours at a time. Every kitchen she asked thought she was crazy—the liability and inconvenience was too high to take the risk. Now, the Rise kitchen acts as a go-between for businesses that have grown too big to stay at home, but aren’t ready or financially able to set out alone to open individual kitchens and storefronts of their own. “Rise is about helping people get started,” Nordstrom says. “It’s a good way to pay it forward.” And in the few years it’s been open, Nordstrom has helped launch nearly 60 local businesses, with everything from super food mixes to honey, beer pickles to barbecue. “I love her to death,” says Ray Maybalot, owner of Mouthole Barbecue. “I can’t thank her enough for the help she gave us in the beginning.” Lending advice and helping Maybalot and wife Nikki get the food and catering licenses they needed, Nordstrom played an important role in starting the business. Lisa Fulk, owner of Sunshine Canning and another Rise team member, talked to Nordstrom before she even started, picking her brain about the food business. “She actually knows what she’s talking about,” Fulk says, “which is really rare.”

EATING HER CAKE

Now Nordstrom owns five different branches of business—her Sift Sugar Shacks, the Rise kitchen, a food-company consulting firm, the Startup Café and the newest addition to the family, the Sift storefront, where she and her two kids, ages 10 and 12, are spending the day. “We’re busy every day, but it’s just part of life for us,” Nordstrom says. “It’s more of our life than a job.” She doesn’t mind working the 18- or 20-hour days, and that’s exactly what she does for nine months of the year with a hectic schedule of baking, consulting, selling and everything in between. Her last day off was in September. But people love coming in and talking to the person who made their treats, which is one of the reasons making time for them too is important to her. “The commitment level my customers have to me is phenomenal,” she says. “It’s because of my customers [that I’m here]; they’re my investors.” And she makes sure everyone knows how much she appreciates them, whether it’s with kind words, seasoned advice or a cookie. For her, it’s about making someone happy for the day, and if that takes a cookie, she’s happy to be the supplier. “It goes beyond just selling someone something. It goes deeper than that,” she says. “When you evoke an emotion in them, there’s so much more of a connection that’s made.” “She really cares about what she’s doing,” Mazur says. “She’s not there to make a dime, she just cares about making delicious food.” Inspired in the kitchen by everything retro, Nordstrom takes old-fashioned things and puts her own twist on them, giving customers a taste of nostalgia and a touch of the past. “This whole place is my childhood,” she says, something she infuses in every bite. “A snicker doodle will evoke something in a person, a memory.” She adds that history to mindfully combined, high-quality ingredients that she personally oversees, trying to touch everything that comes out of her kitchen in one way or another. “We do the simple things, but really well. Anybody can make a snicker doodle cookie, but to do it really well and do it fresh every day, that’s not easy to do.” “I like the simplicity behind things, even with my names,” Nordstrom laughs. “It doesn’t have to be complicated to be successful, that’s what most people don’t realize.” She doesn’t define that success by numbers but rather by the people coming through her door each day. Her businesses were always about more than just work; they reflect and define her life. Sift and Rise are extensions of who she is, the brick-and-oven embodiments of her persona. Even when it came to the names, she borrows from personal history. The first chapter of her life was about sifting out the good from the bad and finding herself. After that, it was about rising up from the ashes. Now she has her cake, and we’re eating it too.