Lacy, Buttery Cookies With a Touch of Heart Are Popping Up Saturday

Photo: Mari Taketa

I find Baker’s Heart on the grounds of a church in Kalihi. Upstairs, volunteers sit at tables packaging freshly made florentine cookies: Coconut & Mac Nut, Kiawe & Toasted Sesame, Sea Salt Chocolate Caramel Coffee, all looking delicate and scrumptious. Downstairs in the kitchen, others bake them—lacy, buttery disks so thin that when I hold them up, I can see my fingers silhouetted on the other side. The vibe upstairs and downstairs is focused: Baker’s Heart is bringing these florentines to a pre-Mother’s Day pop-up at Nordstrom Ala Moana on Saturday, May 11.

The heart of the offerings (sorry, these puns are unavoidable) is Strawberry Dream. The fruity pink rounds are a limited-edition item that come in a box with a Happy Mother’s Day message on the outside. But it’s what’s on a card inside that drew me here: Baker’s Heart is part of the local nonprofit Touch a Heart, which finds people who were homeless or incarcerated and teaches them kitchen skills and life skills—like communication and time management and writing a resumé—then helps them find jobs at restaurants around O‘ahu.

Baker’s Heart Biscotti Bites. Photo: Mari Taketa

So if you’ve been to Monkeypod Kitchen or Zippy’s or Duke’s Waikīkī or Dave & Busters or Minasa, you might have met a graduate or ordered one of their desserts. If you’ve bought Strawberry Dreams, or any of the half-dozen other florentines or biscotti bites that Baker’s Heart makes, you helped fund this program and another one that supplies kūpuna with meals like BBQ Panko Chicken with Vegetables and Mashed Potatoes.

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“The plan was to bake for the omiyage market,” says Touch a Heart’s executive director, Robin Kumabe. “But that was in 2020.” When the pandemic set in, “We had to rethink. So we started making meals for the community and the elderly, and we still do. Anyone can order off the website. And if they can’t afford to pay, we’ll still supply the meals.”

As for the cookies? They’re mostly made with oatmeal, flax and quinoa, like the Strawberry Dreams, or ‘ulu or kiawe pod flour. Toasted macadamia nuts stud the surfaces.

The florentines were the idea of Kumabe’s husband Colin, who spent a career overseeing Zippy’s locations and now heads operations at the nonprofit. The idea of using non-wheat flours was for health and sustainability, he says—and partly because his friend was already paying homeless people to collect kiawe pods. In a way, it fit with Touch a Heart’s mission: to give people at the edges of society a healing, nurturing place to learn a pathway to a sustainable life.

Photo: Mari Taketa

The pace is busy today also because Robin Kumabe is leaving for a Hawai‘i fair in Japan, where she’ll hand out samples of Baker’s Heart florentines. What is your goal?, I ask. “To spread the mission,” Kumabe says. I was thinking about possible cookie contracts. She’s thinking about heart.

Strawberry Dream: box of 6 cookies, $13.50; double box $24
Biscotti Bites in cranberry almond, double chocolate almond or sea salt chocolate caramel coffee: single box $15, double box $30

Available Saturday, May 11, from 11 a.m. at Nordstrom Ala Moana or anytime at Dean & DeLuca at the Ritz-Carlton Waikīkī, or by pre-order online at touchahearthawaii.org. More at @touchaheart.