Delicate round cookies with a topping of baby-blue colored white chocolate and clear sugar crystals are bagged in groups of five on the Kurokawas’ kitchen table. The family just moved into their new house in Santa Maria, and on Oct. 24, the downstairs is bare except in the kitchen area.
Chicken wings are in the oven and plantain fritters are on the stove. On the counter, there are plastic containers full of freshly baked cookies waiting for their turn to be dipped and bagged. And on the table next to the cookies are miniature loaves of tropical carrot cake, bagged and tagged with the Taino Sweets label.
Taino—pronounced Tie-eeno—Sweets is Jovy Kurokawa’s baby, and she started selling her Puerto Rican sweets at the Santa Maria farmers markets in August. In July, Jovy and her husband Sean received their Class A cottage food operations license from the state, which means Taino Sweets can sell directly to consumers.
The California Homemade Food Act passed in September 2012 and went into effect in January 2013, enabling people like Jovy to start their dream businesses out of their own kitchens, without having to spend the money to rent an industrial kitchen.
Sean said the cottage food license is a great way for them “to try it out, to get a feel for it.”
“To see if we get business, and we got a lot of business,” Jovy added.
She said every time they set up shop at either the Wednesday afternoon farmers market at the Town Center Mall or the Saturday morning farmers market at Town Center West, they sell out, no matter how many treats she bakes. She also puts sweets packages together for weddings, which is where the little blue-topped delights on her kitchen table are headed.
The cookies and cakes that Jovy bakes have her Puerto Rican heritage and homeland built into them. She moved to the states permanently in 2001, and has been in the Santa Maria Valley for four years now. The Taíno were indigenous peoples who populated many islands in the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico, before the Spanish came. Jovy said Taíno means good, “so Taino Sweets is making good sweets.”
The cookies on her kitchen table are what Jovy calls traditional Puerto Rican cookies with her own special twist. They are called mantecaditos in the northern part of the island, and traditionally, they are much bigger than the ones Jovy makes and are served with a thumbprint of guava jam in the middle of them.
“When I was little they used to sell them at the [stop]lights,” Jovy said. “Now, I’m not crazy for sweets, but for these I go crazy.”
She said she used to beg her mom to buy one for her, and then she would slowly nibble on the edges of the cookie, eating it little by little to make it last as long as possible. When she was little, she said she would one day learn how to make them for herself. Now, she’s perfected the recipe and makes about 30 different flavors of mantecaditos.
One of her best-selling flavors is piña colada, with real pineapple baked into the middle of the cookie and coconut flakes on the outside. Mantecaditos are powdery and delicate, not too sweet, and very light. Jovy hand rolls each one into a bite-sized cookie that you can just pop into your mouth. She also makes flavors like peanut butter, almond, Nutella, and guava and other Puerto Rican sweets such as panetela—a soft sort of biscotti with preserves baked into it—and mampostial—a coconut and brown sugar bar.
After 20 years of managing bakeries for corporations such as Super Target, Jovy is finally doing things her way, precisely the way she likes it, to her exact specifications.
“It’s a stress release for me,” Jovy said of baking, adding with a laugh, “When I make cookies, I’m praying. … So every cookie has 1,000 souls in purgatory saved.”
Find Taino Sweets at the farmers markets in Santa Maria and in Nipomo, Lompoc, and Oructt starting in November. For more info or to order sweets for your party, call 305-8147, or email tainosweets@yahoo.com.
Managing Editor Camillia Lanham wrote this week’s Biz Spotlight. Information should be sent to the Sun via fax, email, or mail.
This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 5, 2014.