Bake Sale Palisades Has the Sweets for Your Sweetie

By ERIKA MARTIN | Reporter

Trying to decide between getting your Valentine a long-lasting reminder of your love and something as sweet as they are? Thanks to Palisadian Tracy Mestres’ Bake Sale Palisades, you can have both in one gift.

Bake Sale will deliver a dozen hand-made cookies on Valentine’s Day, and then every month for a year when you sign up for the Cookie of the Month Club—with this month’s specials including almond-strawberry Linzer Hearts and dark chocolate with cocoa dipped in chocolate

Mestres started Bake Sale Palisades in 2013 after working as a preschool teacher for five years. She had previously owned a catering company called Good & Plenty but went into childhood education after her daughter died of a brain tumor.

“What was healing was working with kids,” Mestres told the Palisadian-Post. “I loved kids and truly missed my daughter. But then after about five years of that I was like, ‘OK, I’m done picking up Legos.’”

So she decided to do what she’d always done—bake.

“I don’t sew, I don’t do photography, I don’t paint—this is my creative outlet,” Mestres said. “It makes me so happy. I one day just had this thought of ‘I can just have a bakery.’”

At first, she ran the company out of her own kitchen with one convection oven, but she’s since outgrown the space and last year acquired a commercial kitchen in Santa Monica. But Mestres is proud of the company’s homespun nature and still fills orders from home when possible.

Mestres carries on the old-fashioned feel in her recipes, which are often passed down through family members and updated with her own twist. The results are hearty, flavor-packed cookies that can satisfy every type of sweet tooth, with flavors including salted chocolate chunk, flourless peanut butter chocolate chip, oatmeal butterscotch and coconut lime.

Cookies are $15 a dozen, and Cookie of the Month membership starts at $60 for three months, $120 for six months or $240 for the full year. The cookies will be delivered anywhere within 10 miles of Pacific Palisades at no charge. “It’s a perfect gift,” Mestres said. “It didn’t come from New York. It came from here.”

In addition to cookies, Bake Sale offers a selection of pies, bars and scones, which run $20 per pie or $20 a dozen.

Eventually Mestres hopes the business will have a storefront in the Palisades and is hopeful Rick Caruso’s Palisades Village development will deliver the small, affordable commercial space she’s been looking for.

“I very much want a brick-and-mortar [shop] in the Palisades,” Mestres said. “My thinking is, where can I go in town to get a great brownie, scone, fantastic chocolate chunk cookie and a cup of coffee?”