Colorado mother and daughter prepare cottage bakery for Easter

With Easter fast approaching, a small Colorado family bakery in Douglas County called Midwest Mom's is busy preparing cookies, chocolates and other treats. They say Easter weekend is one of their busiest times of the year.

Mother and daughter baking together. It's a tradition that goes back generations in this Italian family.

"Grandpa taught me how to do bread when I was little," said Catherine Price, who lives with husband and mother, Diane Arendt, in Castle Rock.

After moving to Colorado from Chicago in 2020, Arendt lost her husband in 2022 and was craving a piece of home.

"After my husband died, I really didn't know what to do with myself, and I started just baking here and there. And my daughter's friends really liked stuff and wanted to know if I would make different things. And it just kind of blossomed from there. I had no intention of doing this, no. But then it just started to take off," Arendt said.

"When we moved here, we didn't, there weren't any, like, bakeries, like back home," said Price. "And so we just started doing things other people don't do, you know, doing our Chicago-style bakery cookies."

With the help of her daughter, Price, she started a cottage bakery out of the home they share, and in 2024, Midwest Mom's was born.

"We have so much fun together. I'm more sales, marketing, making the things pretty. She makes everything taste delicious," Price said.

Thanks to word of mouth and social media, the orders began pouring in.

"This runs like a well-oiled machine here," Price said, while she and her mother rolled cinnamon rolls.

Holidays like Easter are their bread and butter. They have about 50 orders for the holiday weekend this year.

"The other morning, I started at 4:30," Arendt said. "We'll go till, you know, sometimes 8 at night. It's the oven time. How much can you possibly get in an oven?"

"I love that people celebrate Easter," Price said. "We're a lot busier this Easter than we were last Easter. So this is, I keep calling it Christmas 2.0."

Arendt cooks with plenty of her favorite ingredients, but Midwest Mom's recently started offering gluten-friendly items.

"There's a lot more activity here. But for the most part, we figured out that people will indulge basically around the holidays," Arendt said.

"No shortcuts. We put plenty of icing," said Price, while her mother iced a tray of cinnamon rolls.

While the handmade sweets are hard to resist, the pair says it's the feeling of mom's kitchen that keeps customers coming back.

"It's really about memories, and if, for some people, it's creating new ones, for others, it's bringing back old ones that they have an attachment to," Arendt said. "We put a lot of love into it."

"This is us sharing a part of our family with other families. We want people to come in and feel welcome and feel warm," said Price. "It's not about the bakery, you know? It's about so much more."

On Easter weekend, Midwest Mom's is open Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and closed on Easter Sunday.

Typically, customers can pick up from Midwest Mom's seven days a week. They ask that you call ahead for special orders. The bakery is an at-home cottage bakery, which the state of Colorado does not license, but Midwest Mom's is certified by the state in safe food handling.