Alumni Spotlight:
LAURA COURTEMANCHE ’04

On a sunny Monday afternoon, Laura Courtemanche ’04 and her assistant Yvette Taylor ’06 can be found in the Nuestra Culinary Ventures Kitchens in Jamaica Plain making sugar cookie dough. “I have an order for 210 cookie tins to send off to Dallas,” said Courtemanche, owner of A Dozen Eggs, the area’s new specialty sugar cookie company. Her  iced sugar cookies have been the feature of a segment on the Food Network’s Recipe for Success program and the Phantom Gourmet proclaimed her Beantown cookie collection to be their “hidden jewel” this past January.

Laura, a graduate from the Culinary Certificate Program (CCP), launched A Dozen Eggs in 2004. “I had started catering, making lunches and salads and delivering to clients,” she said. “It got to be too much so I started to focus on making only dog treats and cookies. I found that there wasn’t much of a profit in the dog treats. I started concentrating on the iced cookie after I catered a party at a place called Cameron Perks in Virginia, where I made iced cookies based on children’s book themes: Cat in the Hat, Ducklings, and Green Eggs and Green Ham. I had so much fun making the cookies I knew that this was it. I offered our first cookie tin collection for Christmas 2004,” said Laura. Since then, Dean & Deluca regularly feature A Dozen Egg cookie tin collections in its seasonal catalogues and Lionette’s and A Garden of Eden in Boston’s South End, Savenor’s on Charles Street in Boston, and Pemberton Farms on Mass. Ave. in Cambridge sell her cookies.

“We received over 400 e-mails immediately after A Dozen Eggs was featured on Recipe for Success. I knew we had made it then.” The road to a successful cookie business hasn’t been easy. After spending 18 years working and managing at Learning Smith, FAO Schwartz, and Filene’s Basement, Laura traded cash registers, stock rooms, and clothes racks for piping bags, sheet trays, and Hobart mixers. Like many other CSCA students, Laura left a career in which she was no longer happy. She gave notice at Filene’s Basement in 2002 and applied for a kitchen assistant position with Cook’s illustrated magazine. “It was basically a dish washing position,” said Laura, “but I didn’t care. I was so miserable at Filene’s Basement I needed to make changes.” Laura began the Culinary Certificate Program at CSCA in September 2003. “I had applied to Johnson and Wales when I graduated from high school, but I didn’t go. This was my chance to finally go to culinary school,” she said.

Laura graduated from the CCP program with high honors. As a student, she entered and won a cake contest; her carrot cake was deemed Best of Show. After graduation, she was hired at Hamersley’s Bistro as a pastry assistant. She worked there for 6 months before opening A Dozen Eggs. An owner of ‘hundreds and hundreds and hundreds’ of cookie cutters (some of which have never been used!), Laura’s family history is rich with cooking and baking. Her grandmother and mother both received culinary educations at the Boston Cooking School and Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery. “My family are my biggest influences, oh and Martha Stewart; she is just wonderful,” said Laura. “I had the opportunity to tour her home in Maine with my mother. It was one of the most fabulous and beautiful places: the food, the lunch, the décor, the house, the property.”

In the past two years, Laura has made specialty cookies for the Museum of Science Star Wars exhibit opening party and Harry Potter cookies for a book signing party and has sold several thousand cookie tins through mail order and catalogue order. Her collections include Beantown, Make Way for the Penguins, Spring, Mother’s Day, Birthday, Specialty, and Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and St. Patrick’s Day. Laura has some exciting expansion plans for the future, including incorporating specialty cakes to complement the cookie collections into the business. Her advice for new culinary students, “Don’t ever doubt yourself!”