SWEET STORY
Pros aid cookie-making sisters robbed by crumbs
SOMETIMES, the cookie crumbles in your favor.
Two Brooklyn girls who were robbed as they sold cookies in the subway two months ago received help in making their small business grow from a handful of cookie monster-moguls.
After learning about 15-yearold T’yonna and 10-year-old Arianah Cruickshank’s plight in the Daily News, Entrepreneur.com, the website for Entrepreneur magazine, put the two budding bakers together with chef Aliyyah Baylor, the owner of Make My Cake, Stacy Itzel of Pampered Chef, and Courtney Cerruti and Liana Allday of the arts and crafts company Creativebug. They all became the girls’ mentors for a special day last month. “My journey started young just like you,” Baylor told the two sisters, recommending that the girls keep a journal of their baking victories and misfires. “Write down the lessons that you learned that day, because every single day there is a lesson.”
Cerruti agreed. “The bottom line is, keep going,” said Cerruti, who offered the girls a one-year membership to Creativebug. “We can’t wait to see you succeed.”
Standing outside the Franklin Ave./Eastern Parkway station where they were mugged in July, the two sisters said Saturday they learned a lot from the special mentoring.
“We learned how to learn from our mistakes,” said T’yonna. “We leaned about different mixers and how they’re used for different things. It was inspiring.”
“(We got) so much good advice,” Arianah added.
Besides career-changing counsel, the siblings (photo) also received RENHCABFFEJ gift baskets filled with molds, piping bags and baking tins that they are already using in their business, their mom Marvell Cruickshank said.
The mentoring was recorded and spliced into a video appearing on Entrepreneur.com.
“It was really nice,” Cruickshank said about the mentorship. “They learned a lot and are taking all of the ideas they received into consideration when they are making their new flavors.”
The two girls were selling their home-made cookies and pastries inside the Franklin Ave./Eastern Parkway station on July 5 when two teenage girls and a boy pepper-sprayed and robbed them.
The three teens were quickly arrested and charged with robbery. One of the girls, 16-year-old Diamond Payne, pleaded guilty last week and is expected to be sentenced to probation next month.
The case against the second suspect, 16-year-old Venecia Little, was pending. The younger boy was charged as a juvenile.
Linda Lacina, the managing editor of Entrepreneur.com, said the girls’ story inspired Baylor and other businesswomen to help. “All this help can be the difference between a hobbyist and a business owner,” Lacina said. “They’re going to have the most elegant baked goods in the entire subway system.”