LF, LB natives launch The Sweet Box

The opportunity for people of all culinary skill levels to bake mouth-watering desserts from scratch is now just a computer click away, thanks to the entrepreneurial acumen of Lake Bluff resident Carrie Spezzano and her brother Jim Miller.

On Jan. 29, they launched The Sweet Box. Choose a dessert from their current selection on www.thesweetbox.com and your Sweet Box will arrive with ingredients perfectly weighted, proportioned and individually sealed. When your order ships, you will be emailed a link to the recipe with step-by-step photos and comprehensive, easy-to-follow instructions. Ingredients are organic, GMO-free, and locally sourced whenever possible. Nothing is premixed or artificial or laced with preservatives.

The result: “Even the most novice baker will create impressive desserts,” Spezzano promised. “And your home will smell amazing.”

Technically, Spezzano didn’t come up with the The Sweet Box concept until last year, but it’s most likely been swirling around her DNA since birth.

Spezzano’s grandmother, Lake Forest resident Bernadine Cascarano, made all her meals from scratch, and to this day, at age 86, still bakes bread every day. In turn, Bernadine passed along her cooking skills and love of baking cookies, breads and cakes to her daughter Sherry Miller, also of Lake Forest.

“We sat down to a homemade meal every single night, with homemade bread and everything,” Spezzano said of her childhood.

She graduated from Lake Forest High School in 1997, received a degree in early childhood education from DePaul, and taught for a time in Wilmette and Chicago.

Three years ago she and her husband Matt and their two young children moved to Lake Bluff.

Spezzano began working part-time in the children’s department of the Lake Bluff library, and still does that. But the baking bug was not to be denied.

In the grand tradition of American capitalism, she and Miller identified an unfilled market niche. Successful online businesses like Blue Apron and Plated were filling a need for make-it-yourself main course meals. “But we saw that no one was doing it for baking,” Spezzano said.

By instinct, that void ran afoul of her sense of culinary right and wrong. Or, as she put it: “Everyone should know how to create simple yet elegant, delicious yet natural desserts from scratch and no one should ever, ever have to eat treats that come from a store shelf, whether packaged, prepared or boxed.”

Further, The Sweet Box speaks to the inherent value of homemade baking, Spezzano said.

“It’s really all about the effort,” she said. If your neighbor brings you a plate of cookies, even if they are not the best tasting, you are going to remember that they put in the effort, that they brought you something homemade.”

Spezzano also recognized that in the formulation of the Sweet Box model they were proactively addressing the fact that many people have been turned off to baking because previous efforts were problematic.

One possible explanation, said Spezzano, is that cook book recipes can be “vague.” For example, when a recipe says to “cream” butter and sugar they don’t say for how long or to what consistency. Sweet Box does, with words and pictures. Also, Sweet Box sends ingredients like flour and sugar measured by weight, not by the measuring cup. “Five different people can scoop a cup on flour and it is going to be different for all five people,” she said.

The Sweet Box also negates issues like having to buy expensive ingredients in quantities that will never be used up.

“We are telling people, you can do this. You can have baking success and you can have good homemade treats,” Spezzano said.

The results so far: “we have had overwhelmingly positive results. We have been giving people that sense of pride. They’ve been excited.”

Miller works the business end, including sourcing and marketing. Spezzano develops and tests the recipes at her home and does the actual product packaging at a facility outside Lake Bluff. She also writes a regular blog in which she gives recipes for favorite treats.

Currently, Sweet Box is offering five desserts: banana bread whoopee pies, brown sugar blond cookies, caramel-corn party brownies (using GH Cretor’s caramel corn), saigon cinnamon coffee cake and peanut butter jammers.

Prices range from $10 to $16, for generous numbers of servings. Shipping is a flat rate $3.99. Most orders are processed and shipped within one day.

Spezzano expects in the coming months to expand the product line to upwards of 12 desserts, plus special holiday offerings. “We want to cover a broad range of tastes,” she said.

In addition to their website at thesweetbox.com, they can be reached on their Facebook page and on Instagram: @_the_sweet_box_ and @_carrie_louise_.