It may seem like an oxymoron, but Ottawa’s reigning cookie queen was once a personal trainer. For years, Orléans resident Katrina Macias led a double life as a personal fitness trainer and a cookie addict.

She began baking cookies in her early teens and always dreamed about one day turning it into a business. Those dreams were moved to the back burner as she grew older and became a personal fitness trainer. Even then, she would often order her favourite stuffed cookies from the United States.

Katrina Macias started her company Cookies By Kat in 2020 with the help of her boyfriend and partner Ryan Begin. FRED SHERWIN PHOTO

““It wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic suspended her personal fitness business in March 2020 that she turned her attention back to baking cookies. “I was bored and stuck at home, so I started baking cookies and posting them on Instagram,” explains Macias. “Then friends started asking me for my recipes and someone said, ‘Hey, I’d like to buy some from you’.”

With that first sale, Macias started offering her cookies online with free delivery. Before long, she and her boyfriend Ryan Begin were delivering cookies all over the city. The two began dating just before COVID hit.

After that first sale, Begin gave Macias $100 and told her to go and buy ingredients. “I was her first investor,” he says proudly.

The couple started getting some excellent feedback and they began thinking about turning it into an actual business. The next step was coming up with the hashtag #cookiesbykat and launching their own website.

During those initial weeks, Macias was also perfecting her dough and coming up with different types of stuffed cookies, the most popular of which is The Life of Pie which is stuffed with a butter tart. There’s also the Melting Pot which is filled with white chocolate chips, semi-sweet chocolate chips and crushed-up Oreos and then stuffed with a fudge brownie, and The Force which is made with Kit-Kat bars, M&Ms and Snickers bars and stuffed with a Reese’s Peanut Butter cup to name just a few. There’s also a vegan, dairy/egg version of the Melting Pot called Cookies and Cream. Instead of a fudge brownie, it’s stuffed with chocolate icing.

Besides the stuffed cookies, Macias also makes several different types of traditional cookies which are listed under the heading “small”.

They sell anywhere from 200 to 2,000 cookies a week, but during the Lansdowne Christmas Craft Fair last year they sold over 20,000. “We were baking around the clock for four weeks straight,” says Macias.

You can find Kat and Ryan, or Ryan’s father Bob, who customers have nicknamed “Big Bob”, at the Cumberland Farmer’s Market held every Saturday morning in Cumberland Village, as well as the Original Navan Market which is held on the last Sunday of the month.

For a complete listing of all the cookies, or to place an order, visit cookiesbykat.com.