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Things are a little sweeter in Lakeway Area after a local baker expands her offerings.

Whitney Drees started her business, Lakeside Sweets, in 2021 after watching cookie decorating videos on Instagram. She has been serving custom cookies to her customers for a few years now, but has renovated a 50 year old livestock trailer into a cookie stand that can be set up at festivals, pop-up sale locations and other events.

“I’m very excited to not have to lug around a tent anymore,” she said, reflecting on her former display setup. “It’s just a cute little way to enter the community and get to know some people. Now that we’re on wheels I can just load everything up in there and go.”

At a ribbon cutting at the Farmers Market in downtown Morristown on Wednesday, organized by the Morristown Area Chamber of Commerce, Drees was eager to show off the goods and prepared some oatmeal crème pies and macaroons.

The gathered local business ambassadors were all smiles as they tried out the baked treats and encouraged Drees in her effort.

And that kind of encouragement and support is what has kept the effort going for Drees, especially the support from her husband, Jeff.

“I started making treats to take to work… trying to lift spirits up,” she said. “People were like, ‘you probably need to sell these.’ I just have excellent support from my husband, who is involved in the dishwashing as well.”

Being a small business owner is difficult, and Drees said she keeps pretty busy with the baking, cleaning, media and marketing work, in addition to her work as a pharmacist. She works hard to keep evolving and growing the business.

“I do custom orders. I take those through my website. I also teach cookie decorating classes,” she said.

“I also do corporate orders as well. So I have an edible logo cookie printer. So think like your regular desktop printer, but for cookies. So I will bake the cookies, ice them, run them through the printer. And I can print any image, logo, graphic onto the surface of a cookie. In addition to that, I like doing pop-ups. So as a baker, it can kind of be lonely to be in the kitchen for hours at a time by yourself. So I really enjoy getting to come out into the community and engaging with people. And so for decorating cookies, you don’t get to do that as much.”

Drees said getting people the cookies they want is important and she talked about some of the variety of cookies available.

“We have all kinds of flavors of macarons,” she said. “Anything you can think of. I also have oatmeal cream pies. They’re made from scratch, homemade. That is quite popular with my followers online — so if you’ve had one, you know. And we bake seasonal treats: lemon blueberry in the summer, caramel apples in the fall. And, of course, we have classic chocolate chip cookies — the classic comfort dessert thing.”