It's Dough Time Baby! Story By Maggie Caraway Photos By Abbey Crank and Contributed By Judi Middleton
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love for baking, a mother-daughter bond and a receptive community. This is the recipe for success for local business, It’s Dough Time Baby. It’s Dough Time Baby is an Opelika bakery that specializes in custom, homemade cookies. Owner Judi Middleton operates completely out of her home in Opelika. Middleton has a nook off to the side of her house where she finds peace and gets creative. She displays her array of cookie cutters on a large board, hanging on pegs. She also has multiple shelving structures to store baked cookies, ingredients and all the different tools she uses to create cookie designs. With a background in graphic design, she uses her talents to create art. Middleton said she has always loved to bake and stuck to simple sugar cookies with a powdered sugar and water icing before her daughter, Aimee, convinced her to take baking to the next level. “She really wanted to see if we could do it,” Middleton said. The personalized cookie trend had just started to become popular in 2014 and, around Christmas, Middleton and Aimee decided to put their baking skills to the test. “We baked a bunch of Christmas cookies. It took us all week to do them … it just took forever but we enjoyed the time together and then we just enjoyed the process of it.”
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