A sweet success story

SHIRLEY » When Karen Collins, owner and CEO of Bisousweet Confections, learned to bake the sweet treats — cookies, cakes, pies, pastries — that are her company’s mainstay today, she was living in Vermont, where she grew up, working in her home kitchen.

A Massachusetts resident for over two decades, Collins now works in a 5,000 square foot commercial kitchen at Phoenix Park, where she launched the wholesale bakery business in 2014.

Bisousweet (the word bisou means kiss in French) products are “made with love,” according to Collins, who lists an array of handcrafted, home-baked goods her creative kitchen is noted for, such as soft biscotti and doughnut muffins — baked, not fried — that “taste like old-fashioned doughnuts.”

An enticing array of Bisousweet’s treats are colorfully depicted on the company’s website, www.bisousweet.com, along with tantalizing sketches from the founder/owner and chief pastry chef’s personal success story. It begins with the discovery of her mom’s small cookbook collection, tucked away on a den shelf in her childhood home.

Captivated, Collins chose “the sweets section” to map out a career.

“I knew I wanted to be a pastry chef,” Collins said. But it was not a bee-line. “No path in life is direct,” she said, and her choice made all the difference, along with a baker’s dollop of entrepreneurial spirit.

Tracing her trajectory from a simple question — asking to bake a cake from scratch instead of a mix — to convincing a teacher that the New York Times Cookbook was acceptable for a book report, Collins recalls that even her youthful daydreams were set to a different drumbeat as she “doodled” pictures of wedding cakes in the margins of her math notebook.

She became an “obsessed” collector of copper cookie-cutters, amassed her own cookbook collection.

In 1994, Collins started working in “a real pastry kitchen” as a dishwasher. One day, the pastry chef didn’t show up for an “early bake” and she was tapped to fill in. “I swung into action,” she said.

Four years later, she was in business.

In 1998, Collins and her thenhusband co-founded Nashoba Brook Bakery in West Concord. It was a success. But her story doesn’t end there. Collins has moved on and branched out.

The partnership ended in 2004 and she left the business. The next year, she struck out on her own.

As she tells it, the idea dawned when she had a cake in the oven, butter cream gelling in the mixer. Collins had “the sparkle of a thought,” she said. “I could start a business!”

Which she did, in her own home kitchen. In 2013, Collins purchased an 80-quart mixer, her first, followed by an industrial-size bowl lift, which turned