School is back in session, and lunches get packed the night before. Somebody used to do that for you. A sandwich, an apple, and on the good days, a cookie, tucked in because they knew you’d want one. This week, the tradition comes back to your own lunch: buy any whole lunch sandwich and add any regular cookie for a dollar. Or pass it down and pack the cookie in your kid’s lunchbox instead. One more sacrifice. Either way, it’s the easiest good decision of the week.
The offer is good with all four lunch sandwiches. The Demi is ham, fontina, and organic field greens with Dijon mustard. The Carne brings together pulled pesto chicken, roasted red peppers, mozzarella, and lemon aioli on our Organic Sour White. The Verdura features heirloom tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, basil, and arugula with balsamic aioli on our Pizza Bianca. The Grilled Cheese is Beecher’s Flagship and fontina on Rustic Potato. Add a side organic greens salad or a cup of soup to any of them for $6.25.
Your dollar buys any regular cookie in the case. Our standard lineup includes Olivia’s Chocolate Chip, Ginger Molasses, Snickerdoodle, Old Fashioned Peanut Butter, Chocolate Oat Peanut Butter, and Apricot Oat Pecan. They’re made fresh daily, and quantities of each are limited, so no promises on what you’ll find, especially later in the day. The Brown Sugar Shortbread and our cookie packs are not available as part of the deal.
Pack it in a lunchbox. Carry it back to your desk. Save it for 3 o’clock if you can wait that long. The $1 cookie runs Monday, September 14 through Sunday, September 20 at all Macrina cafés.
Bella Lopez came to Macrina in March 2019 for the overnight packer job, drawn by hours that fit her life then. In the interview Scott Romine from HR told her she was overqualified and pointed her toward an office opening instead. She interviewed for customer service and was hired soon after. She grew from there. In December 2021 she became assistant manager of the wholesale office, and general manager in September 2025. She now tracks issues across the company, working to minimize mistakes, and serves as donations coordinator, working with Leslie Mackie on the bread, pastry, and merchandise Macrina gives to organizations around the Pacific Northwest.
The pull toward serving people is older than the bakery. Before Macrina she was the lead office liaison at a real estate company, doing the early groundwork for buyers before handing them to a lender. Before that she spent several years at World Vision, a Seattle nonprofit. “My passion for serving others has shown in the previous work I’ve done,” says Bella. “I came to Macrina having developed skills that help me connect with the community through our many donations.”
Bella grew up around Burien and Federal Way, and spent her childhood traveling between there and California to see family, making memories she now passes on to her own kids.
Today she runs the wholesale side of the bakery and looks after its customers, overseeing the wholesale office and the accounts receivable department. The office holds four customer service reps. No two days are the same. Around the steady work of calls, emails, and entering orders into Cybake, something new always turns up: an order to troubleshoot, a redelivery to coordinate, samples to taste. She calls the office the hub of Macrina. When a problem comes up, people bring it there, and if the answer is not in the room, the office finds someone who has it.
Plenty has changed since she arrived. She saw the heavy order volume before COVID, then rode out the shutdowns with Macrina, essential workers keeping an essential business open and inventing new products to meet what the community needed. Staff have turned over, as they do, but she has watched many long-tenured people keep growing with the place. Her proudest moments are about people rising. In October 2025 she promoted one of her reps, Megan, to a lead role the office had never had, showing the team that growth here is real. She has cross-trained her team across departments too.
Her favorite thing about Macrina is the people, who carry the same values and care into the job. Bella lives in Federal Way with her two daughters, turning eight and four this year, the little gremlins who keep her ready for anything. Off the clock she is with family and friends: paint nights, hikes around the Pacific Northwest, concerts, new restaurants, and trips to Disneyland or the coast. In the quiet hours she reads, writes, paints, draws, and when she can, naps.
“No organization has done more for good bread in this country than the Bread Bakers Guild,” says Scott France, Macrina’s president and co-owner. “When Macrina opened in 1993, the Guild was just getting started. The artisan bread movement owes much to the Guild.”
Consider American bread in 1993. Soft supermarket loaves were everywhere. Bread with a crackling crust, made of nothing but flour, water, salt, and time, was hard to find and harder to learn to make. After culinary school, Leslie had gone to Europe to learn breads that required a long, slow fermentation before returning to Seattle and refining her craft at Grand Central Bakery before opening Macrina. Most American bakers made do with a few books, a scattering of classes, and whoever happened to be working down the street. In 1993 the Bread Bakers Guild of America brought together a group of people who discovered they were all trying to do the same thing. It gave bakers who had each been solving the same problems alone a place to find one another and compare notes.
Three decades on, it has nearly 2,000 members, including bakery owners, bakery employees, millers, farmers, suppliers, teachers, students, and serious home bakers. Its mission is to help craft bakeries and working bakers thrive, and it pursues that through classes, field trips, and gatherings. In 2025 those programs drew more than 2,500 registrations.
Macrina has been part of it nearly the whole way, both as a member and in leadership roles. Leslie Mackie served on the Guild board from 2012 to 2015. Scott serves today as its treasurer.
We never stop learning
Ask anyone at Macrina and you will hear the same thing. There is always more to know.
Sergio Castañeda, our production manager, takes baking classes through the Guild, as do other members of our production team. Fanny Alvarado, our director of operations, and Scott each went through the Bakery Leadership Circle, a months-long seminar in which bakery owners and operators from around the country work through the business challenges of running a successful bakery. In 2024 our whole leadership team went to Camp Bread, the Guild’s flagship gathering, three days of hands-on education and shared meals with bakers from everywhere. We plan to go again in 2027.
No secrets
Passionate bakers of any age learn from those with experience working with different styles and wheats. There are no secrets. Just a love of artisanal breads, bagels, pies, cakes, and pastries — and a desire to help others learn new techniques and recipes. A baker with a question can get an answer from someone who has been at it for forty years. Bakeries open their doors to visitors, including their competitors. Any Guild member who wants to visit Macrina is welcome, and many have.
That same spirit runs through the whole world of grain. When The Bread Lab up in Skagit Valley hosted a grain gathering this year, Sergio took a class there, and Leslie and Scott drove up for the dinner. Other Guild members filled the room. The Bread Lab is its own organization with its own focus, but the people are the same people, and the conversations run in the same direction. It is part of why we include organic heirloom wheats milled at Cairnspring Mills in our breads. You can taste the results.
What a cookie can do
Which brings us back to the shortbread.
Every Brown Sugar Shortbread sold from September 7 to 13 helps the Guild do what it does. Last year it ran classes on fermentation, lamination, whole grains, and baker’s math, took bakers into the fields and mills where their flour begins, and brought more than forty bakeries together for three days of learning. The Guild’s goal is a sustainable path into a baking career, and into bakery ownership, for anyone willing to do the work.
So buy a cookie. You won’t be sorry. And it helps raise the bar for bread and pastry at bakeries across the country. Macrina included.
Strawberries are available year-round, but those from your garden or local farmstand, ripened by warm days and sunshine, are the sweetest of all. Strawberries are best when they’re simply allowed to shine. You can enjoy their natural sweetness without competing flavors. This cake is a perfect example of that philosophy, showcasing local strawberries layered with vanilla cake and lightly sweetened whipped cream. This recipe is from our forthcoming cookbook, Macrina at Home. Until then, bake it while local berries are at their peak.
12 Tbsp (1½ sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
6 cups fresh strawberries, divided
1 Tbsp cornstarch
2 cups heavy cream
Garnish: garden strawberries and leaves
Preheat oven to 325°F. Brush two 6-inch cake pans with neutral oil on base and sides, and line with cut-out circles of parchment paper, plus 3-inch strips on the sides. These will extend higher than the sides of your cake pans. The oil will adhere parchment to the pan and protect the cakes from sticking.
Sift flour, 1¾ cups of the sugar, baking powder and salt into a medium bowl. Stir to combine and set aside.
In a separate bowl add the egg yolks, 1 Tbsp vanilla and ¼ cup of the milk. Mix with a whisk and set aside.
Add butter to the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Cream for 4 to 5 minutes, until pale in color. Add the flour mixture, pulsing a few times, then mixing on low to fully combine. With mixer on low speed, slowly add the remaining milk. Increase to medium speed and mix for 30 seconds.
Add a third of the egg mixture and mix on medium speed for 20 to 30 seconds. Scrape bowl’s sides to make sure everything gets incorporated. Repeat the process 2 more times, until all egg mixture is incorporated.
Divide batter evenly between the prepared pans. Place on oven’s center rack. Bake for 30 to 32 minutes or until golden brown. A toothpick inserted in the center should come out clean.
Let cakes cool on a wire rack for 30 minutes, then invert and remove from pans. Peel off parchment and let cool completely.
Sort through your strawberries, choosing 1 cup of beauties for garnishing. Cut the remaining 5 cups into quarters. Place in a medium saucepan. Cook over low heat for 2 to 3 minutes to release the juices. In a small bowl combine ¼ cup sugar and 1 Tbsp cornstarch. Add to the berries and cook for another 1 to 2 minutes to dissolve sugar and slightly thicken the cooked strawberries. Pour into a separate bowl and let cool to room temperature.
In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment, whip heavy cream with remaining ¼ cup sugar and 2 tsp vanilla. Whip to medium-stiff peaks then keep cool in the refrigerator.
Cut each cake in half horizontally, creating a total of 4 layers. Set aside.
If you wish you can trim the golden-brown surface of each layer top and bottom, but truly it’s just for presentation purposes and reduces the size of your overall cake.
Place a cake layer onto your presentation plate and spread with ⅓ cup cooked strawberries. Top with ¾ cup of sweetened whipped cream and level with a spatula. Repeat these steps with the second and third layers of cake, finishing with the final cake layer on top. Press down lightly on the top layer to level. Make sure sides are aligned for the final exterior frosting. Chill cake for 20 minutes to set up.
Add remaining cooked strawberries to the last of the whipped cream. Mix them only partially. It’s nice to see some pieces of strawberry in the frosting. Frost the cake’s exterior with the whipped cream, smoothing surfaces with a spatula. Garnish by placing the remaining strawberries on top and around the plate. To complete the summer cake presentation, I like to add garden strawberries and leaves also. Chill cake until ready to serve.
