Dave and Judie Paup bake the goods for just about occasion

Originally published Saturday, November 6, 1999

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Mostly, the baked goodies at Cookies In Bloom go out the door of the Old Bellevue shop in beautiful, tasty condition, but looking like anything but a cookie. What Dave and Judie Paup do to cookies is what Louis Armstrong did with music.

In fact, like Satchmo, they make it "A Wonderful World" of cookies shaped like children and puppies and salmon and Space Needles and Safeco Field and Michael Jordan and ... "you name it!" says Paup, who was a structural steel engineer.

The Paups have lived in Bellevue for more than 26 of their 36 married years, most of that on the edge of the Glendale Country Club course ("And we don't even play golf!" Judie says). But when Dave felt it was time to come down off the tightrope of specialty steel engineering, he "wanted to get into something that was fun, that we could do together."

Their three children -- Debbie, David and Tiffany -- were finally out of the nest and Judie, who says she'd spent all those years as "a professional volunteer ... everything from soccer mom to Girl Scout cookie chairman to food bank volunteer," needed something else in her life.

Cookies In Bloom, at 11 103rd Ave. N.E., behind a Mexican restaurant and across the street from the 7-Eleven, is blossoming as part of the rebirth of this sometimes-forgotten part of the downtown. With construction going on all around them, they "get the impression that there's not going to be a whole lot of 'old' Bellevue left much longer," Dave said.

But that hasn't hampered cookie production in the 2,200-square-foot bakery and retail shop that is wall-to-wall cookie arrangements. They bake several hundred cookies every day and ship arrangements all over the world.

The basic cookie for elaborate floral-type arrangements is a simple almond sugar cookie. Judie explains, "Only I use my recipe -- in fact, they're all my recipes, because we think ours are better."

Dave and Judie started dating when they attended Clover Park Junior High. "He was so very shy!" she recalled. "He was coming home from basketball practice, I think, and he was going over a bridge and I was in my speedboat and I yelled up at him: 'Hey, you wanna go to the dance with me?!"' she said.

It must've been a young love trauma when his father's job as a J.C. Penney Co. manager took Dave to Oregon in his last year of high school. They kept in touch as he went on to Oregon State for a degree in mechanical engineering and Judie went to the Pasadena Playhouse to study acting.

Dave did a quick tour in the Army National Guard ("Would you believe, they sent me to baking school?!") and then returned to college to complete his degree. Judie, meanwhile, had gone from acting and modeling to being a flight attendant for Northwest Airlines. That job crashed when Judie and Dave married in his senior year ("That was in the days that flight attendants couldn't be married," she said.) and she convinced him to go on for his MBA degree at Stanford.

Their first child came soon thereafter, and Dave's career went up like a skyscraper frame.

Judie has one interesting observation about raising children alongside a golf course: "Kids pick up the darnedest language from hearing what golfers shout on the tees and the greens!"

Meanwhile, Dave was on the road much of the time with his specialized steel work. "I did that for 11 years, until 1996, not long after the last of our children was graduated from Washington State," he said. "We wanted to do something together, some kind of 'feel good' business, so we checked out all the franchise options."

He added, "We don't advertise; we don't do coupons. It's all word-of-mouth." he said. People come in off the street or order off the Internet or fax. "We've got regular accounts with Microsoft, the Sonics and the Seahawks and Boeing," he said, rattling off a list of all the really big cookie eaters in town.

"Some of our special orders are sort of secret; companies want special cookies for their IPOs, and I guess that gives us inside information," he said.

"One customer was so grateful to a local psychiatrist that they sent an arrangement of 11 'ear' cookies with the message: 'Thanks For Listening!'" Dave recalled.

"See what I mean about a 'feel good' business? We deal directly with people doing nice things for other people, and that's got to make you feel good!" he said.

Well ... it's not all that easy. "It's real, real hectic around here at Valentine's Day," Dave said, "and one time we got the wrong notes on two different arrangements. One was a pretty straight-forward 'thank you' piece from a customer to a local business; the other was real lovey-dovey thing. We got called right away, and knew what had happened. So I had to dash around and get the right message cards to the intended recipients," Dave said.

If a customer wants a cookie that's "outside the lines" of the hundred or so cookie shapes they make, Dave simply makes a custom cookie cutter out of special copper. "We tell our customers we'll make anything ... as long as it's not illegal or immoral," said Judie. "And I'm not always sure ... but I know we've rejected some."

Jon Hahn is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I. He can be reached at 206-448-8317 or e-mail him at jonhahn@seattle-pi.com