Moving forward with creating a business
Michaela Bissonette is pictured in her kitchen where she operates her home business, Ella & Jack’s Home Bakery. Below is a photo of a few of the thousands of cookies she baked and decorated for her Feb. 10 popup bake sale. The roses on the heart, she explained, are created using a technique called “wet on wet,” that is, swirling one color of icing on another before it is dry.
BROKEN BOW - Michaela Bissionette of Broken Bow is looking forward to the future with her home business, Ella and Jack’s Home Bakery. It’s something she and her late husband, James, talked about.
“We threw around the idea of a bakery,” she said. “We liked the idea. We were crunching the numbers but future plans changed.”
Bissonette explained she was a typical home baker of cookies and other family favorites. Then, in 2020, she and her mother, Christina Nelson, made hot chocolate bombs. These are chocolate shells filled with flavors of hot chocolate mix. They were available at local shops and via Facebook.
”You drop them in hot milk,” she said. “They were a hit.”
In the hunt for more creative ideas, she and her mother researched how to make royal icing. “We watched a lot of YouTube videos,” she said.
That year, she made Valentine’s Day cookies for the nurses at Melham Medical Center where she worked as an executive assistant. The cookies were well received. It was time, Bissonette decided, to create her own business.
“I researched how you can bake from home,” she explained. “It’s called being a ‘cottage food baker.’”
As a cottage food baker, she is not subject to inspection. She is limited to items that do not need refrigeration; products must be shelf stable. She took the required food handling course and registered with the Department of Agriculture. That meant she needed a name. She found that name in her own home.
“I named it Ella and Jack’s Home Bakery, after my children,” she said. “I knew I would be baking in my spare time, which is their time. I would bake on their time.”
By mid-2021, she was baking but “not a ton,” she said. She and James were talking about the business. Cookies were selling by Facebook and word of mouth. She made sugar cookies, cupcakes and some weddings cakes, though she no longer makes wedding cakes. Cupcakes, however, remain on her list with flavors of white wedding cake, lemon, chocolate and strawberry.
James contracted COVID in September, 2021 and became terminally ill.
In the midst of the grief, however, Bissonette found hope, if not for James, then for someone else. She said both she and James were organ donors. When she learned he would not be coming home, she asked, “Can he be an organ donor since he had COVID?” Being an organ donor, she said, would give James purpose for no longer being here.
“I thought about the recipient’s family,” she said. “What I was going through was completely the opposite for them. What I had been praying for, they were going to get. I can’t imagine waiting for that phone call.”
Live On Nebraska, an organization that helps families through organ donation, was with her every step of the way. She said they looked out for James, fulfilling her wish that he remain comfortable. It was three days from the decision to the donation. James died Sept. 23, 2021. He was 34.
Baking, for the most part, came to a halt as Bissonette took care of their two children and started the task of learning how to navigate life without her husband of 10 years. “It was one day at a time, sometimes one second at a time,” she said.
In February of this year, Live On Nebraska reached out to Bissonette, asking if she could be featured in an article. Timing was excellent; she had already planned on a pop-up bake sale on Feb. 10 with proceeds going to the organization. She was asked if she knew that Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day, is also National Donor Day.
“I always want to do something to give back,” she said. “I love Valentine’s Day. What’s more fitting because he donated his heart.”
Bissonette spent weeks baking and frosting, borrowing space in family and friends freezers. She baked more than 2,000 cookies and raised more than $5,000. “That includes 20 percent from the sales at Lillie Kate Boutique (where the sale was held) for that day,”
Back in 2021, a few months after James’ death, Bissonette made the decision to leave her job at Melham. “I wanted to be with the kids as much as possible. If I were home more, I’d have more time to bake.”
Bissonette continues to bake in her home kitchen. She looks for inspiration from many places. Sometimes a customer will give her a specific idea and other times they chosse a theme and tell her to run with it.
Her sugar cookie recipe is “kind of ” pro
prietary, springing from a family recipe, though she has tweaked it a bit. “Grandma asked me about it and I told her, ‘You already know it,’” she said.
Much of the beauty of her decorating is in the details - creative shapes with vibrant colors. “The big key to vibrancy is to mix it (the frosting) light and let it bloom,” she said. She likes to “paint” roses, swirling two colors, like red on white. “It’s called ‘wet on wet,” she explained. “You don’t let the frosting dry. It’s my favorite to do and it’s fun.”
Cottage businesses cannot have employees. Sometimes, though, Ella and Jack might help with sprinkling edible dust on cookies. More often, their “help” takes the form of them decorating their own cookies.
At three years old, Jack’s favorite cookies are, “Bunnies.” Asked what he does to help, he answered, “Frost them,” His favorite colors of frosting, he said, with a bit of help from his mother and sister, are red, blue, yellow and “not pink.”
At seven, Ella can help with a bit more. - packaging cookies, mixing the frosting and cleaning up. She says the cookies are good and she also likes the cupcakes. Her favorite, she said, is chocolate with no frosting, because “the chocolate is good by itself.”
The largest cookie order Bissonette has done (outside the thousands she made for her Feb. 10 bake sale) was 540. “I won’t do less than a dozen. I have to have enough of an order to bake,” she explained.
Her faith keeps her steady and keeps her looking forward. She said her faith grew as she prayed and talked to God and visited with others while James was hospitalized. And she has a message.
“I want people to know good things can come from grief,” she said. “Every grief process is different. There will always be grief but every day is not hard. It’s God’s plan.” The children, she said, are also doing OK, adding, “They know Daddy is in heaven.”
As she looks to the future, Bissonette toys with the idea of having an actual bakery but is in no rush.
“Right now I want to spend time with the kids before our lives are chaos. Baking keeps me busy. I’m surrounded by people and not lacking in adult conversation, she said.”
Her faith, family and friends, her children, creativity and baking sustain her as she faces forward toward the future. And she repeats something she heard James say, ““Life is too short to not do something you absolutely love.”
At right, Jack Bissonette, 3, and Ella Bissonette, 7, share as embrace after talking about how they help with their Mom’s home bakery, Ella & Jack’s Home Bakery. Michaela named the business after her children because, she said, “I would be baking on their time.” After their father, James, died in 2021, Michaela resigned her job at Melham to devote her time to her children and to baking.