How Perfectly Artisanal Found Its Recipe for Success
Photos by Jamie Plain
For Laurie Pruden, a cookie can carry a family recipe, a childhood memory, or a little of the chaos that comes with figuring out life. Through Perfectly Artisanal, she has found room for all three — and now, she’s able to share them from her first Owensboro storefront.
Pruden launched the home bakery in October 2024 to earn extra money as her children left home and headed to college. She baked around her work schedule at a bank, selling cookies while trying to give her family some financial breathing room.
Pruden recently left that job after nine years to make Perfectly Artisanal her full-time career. It is a major risk, she said, but one she is ready to take.
“It’s kind of a now-or-never situation, and we’ll see what will happen,” Pruden said.
Pruden was introduced to cooking at a young age. She spent much of her time around her mom and nana, who showed kindness and selflessness to others through their cooking. Her mom was always baking goods for others, while her nana often prepared food for fellow churchgoers.
For Pruden, that family tradition also shaped how she views food: as a way to bring people together.
“That’s one way to get to know people,” Pruden said. “One way to break down barriers is bonding over food.”
While Perfectly Artisanal provides cookies and sweets, Pruden hopes it can also offer help and comfort to people going through a rough patch.
“I’ve kind of always tried to do that,” Pruden said. “I don’t know how else to help somebody, but I can bring you over something to eat. That’s what started the cookie journey that I’m on today.”
Pruden has drawn inspiration from some of her mom’s and nana’s recipes. She is also always scouring the internet for ideas about how to mix and match flavors, and customers offer suggestions through their feedback.
Blending different flavors is something Pruden takes pride in. For her, making a good cookie is one thing, but combining unexpected flavors offers another opportunity to make it her own.
“I do research before I do any of it,” Pruden said. “I think about if I like it and how I can make it mine.”
For example, Pruden worked on an ube cookie for the fall season. Its purple color drew her attention, and she began experimenting with chocolate, espresso powder, and black cherry.
“It was actually a sweet potato base and purple in color, and I was drawn to it just for the color more than anything,” Pruden said. “It was really pretty, but it had that earthy tone because of the sweet potato. Well, how would I make it mine? It’s a purple velvet, so we need to add a little bit of chocolate, and we add some espresso powder because it draws out the chocolate flavoring. Then, I pair it with black cherry.”
Another thing that makes Perfectly Artisanal’s cookies unique is their names and the backstories Pruden gives them. Moose Behavior, for example, is named after a childhood friend whose nickname was Moose.
Giving her cookies personas also allows her to pay tribute to important people or memories in her life, especially those who helped her along the way to running Perfectly Artisanal.
“There’s always a little bit of a nod to certain people in my life,” Pruden said. “I might remember that they like this type of food, or they had this type of personality, or this reminds me of them for whatever reason, and I incorporated it into my food, and people have been very accepting of that.”
Perfectly Artisanal began gaining traction as its social media following grew. Pruden pointed to two moments that helped her realize the business’s potential.
Her TikTok following went from about 300 followers to more than 1,000 in a day after she shared the story of how Perfectly Artisanal was created to help support her children as they started their adult lives as college students.
Other content creators also posted about Pruden’s cookies, generating tens of thousands of views across social media. When Pruden went out in public, people began recognizing her because of Perfectly Artisanal.
One night, messages started flooding in from people who wanted to try her cookies and see what the business was all about.
“We set up at the Farmers’ Market the next morning, and I was sold out in 40 minutes,” Pruden said.
That response helped Pruden see a future for the business beyond baking on the side.
At its heart, though, Perfectly Artisanal remained rooted in her efforts as a single mother to provide financial stability for her children in college.
Money had been hard to come by at times without a second source of income, but that never stopped Pruden from “fighting tooth and nail to try to make things work.”
“I think I’ve built a brand on being the underdog that has never taken the conventional road for anything in life,” Pruden said. “Some people show the good of everything, and I’m going to show you the craziness of it. Some people hide the crazy, and I don’t. I’ll admit to some of the crazy mistakes and wonder how I even got here still, and I envelop that in the backstory of my cookies. I think people can relate to that. It doesn’t matter what walk of life you come from.”
After taking a chance and pouring so much into Perfectly Artisanal, Pruden is preparing to continue honoring her mom and nana, one cookie at a time, in a storefront of her own at 1700 Frederica Street.
“There’ll be special nods to them within the store that I’m working on,” Pruden said. “I have some special things in the works specifically for those people in my life that have gotten me to where I am because I really didn’t think people like me got chances to do things like this.” OL
