Ashleigh Ratchford was selling her cookies—which are soft and thick and come in flavors like chocolate chip birthday cake—at Durham’s Christmas tree lighting festival last year when someone pressed a piece of paper into her hand.
It was an application for an incubator space on Main Street, owned by Downtown Durham Inc., that is intended to help small women-owned businesses get off the ground. Ratchford, who had been selling cookies online and through wholesale accounts for years, filled the application out on the spot.
“I was like, ‘Yes, 100 percent, yes,’” Ratchford says. “I just need a small space, like, I just need a chance to be where people can see me.”
Ratchford’s application was selected, and she will open Ashleigh Bakes Daily at 307 West Main Street on June 20, replacing the gift shop Sh*t Diana Makes (recently renamed Fate & Folklore). She’ll be there for at least the next six months.
The incubator space has no kitchen, so Ratchford will continue baking in a commercial kitchen space on Lakeland Street while using the Main Street storefront as a “cookie counter.” Ratchford says visibility is what’s key. For a time, she was selling from a shed behind another business on Guess Road. Customers had to know to look for her.
“This is literally a dream come true, for the cookies to be so seen,” Ratchford says, of her new storefront. “Because that’s usually all it takes, is for somebody to walk by and be like, ‘What’s that?’”
Sure enough, while she was sitting in the space during her INDY Week interview, at least five passersby stop to peer in the window.
When Ratchford was a kid, she liked to heat up Chips Ahoy in the microwave, which should tell you something about the kind of cookie she likes and makes: not crunchy but also not doughy in the center, like the famous ones from Levain Bakery in New York. Hers are substantial and pillowy—fully baked and tender throughout. It’s a style of cookie that evokes food blogs of the early 2010s, when sites like Sally’s Baking Addiction championed chewy cookies made with cornstarch or cream cheese and chilled dough.
After the next online sweets era, in which cookie content became dominated by hypnotic time-lapse videos of meticulously decorated sugar cookies—crisp canvases valued more for their aesthetic potential than eating experience—the pendulum swung back to soft cookies meant to be devoured, but with a new emphasis on spectacle. The reigning trend is Crumbl-style cookies: brash confections the size of Marie Callender’s chicken pot pies, topped with emoji-turd swirls of buttercream.
Ratchford’s cookies are in keeping with that earlier, simpler soft batch approach. She doesn’t do frosting. Flavor-wise, she’s more concerned with interiors: her current lineup includes cookies studded with Oreos, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, rainbow sprinkles, and red velvet cake crumbs.
“I don’t want it to just be pretty,” Ratchford says. “I want you to bite into it and be like, ‘Oh my god, this reminds me of something.’”
She likes to look for inspiration in the snack aisle in grocery stores. Her long-term dream is to have a Cold Stone-esque cookie shop where customers pick their own mix-ins and cookies are baked on the spot.
A Fayetteville native who studied at North Carolina A&T, Ratchford spent several decades in corporate jobs. When the pandemic hit, her five-year-old daughter was suddenly doing kindergarten online, and Ratchford needed a way to work from home. She initially launched a meal prep service, then realized she didn’t actually like cooking that much and pivoted to selling cookie dough to friends. Her first attempt at wholesale—trying to get cookies into smoke shops—didn’t pan out, but she eventually landed accounts with a few local businesses before setting up shop in the Guess Road shed for a stint. Lately, she’s been relying mostly on online orders and pop-ups.
Ratchford says the past two months have been a roller coaster marked by a family tragedy. Amid the ups and downs, she finds solace in the rhythm of baking. She hand-mixes every batch and can tell when the dough is ready by feel.
“I always feel lighter when I leave the kitchen than when I came in,” she says. “And if I go into it in a great mood, I’m in this wildly euphoric place by the time I come out.”
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