Holiday-Themed Simply Divine Brownies

A former teacher's quest for good, gooey desserts.

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For the upcoming holidays, Simply Divine Brownies offers hand-cut decorated desserts from falling leaves to snowflakes, ornament-shaped Image brownies that feature a photo or logo, sampler boxes and brownie truffle confections.

The brownies are heralded for their rich, fudgy taste and myriad hand-cut, hand-decorated shapes. They’ve even been distributed at the Academy Awards, where celebrities have gushed about them. And they all started with CEO Trina Beaulier’s love of brownies, even when her life’s work was focused elsewhere.

Beaulier spent the past 20 years teaching. In 1998, she was a State of Maine Finalist for Teacher of the Year, and in 1999 she received the prestigious Milken Award, having designed and implemented a multi-age program for gifted students in Cumberland, Maine. “Teaching is the best job in the world. It was a 24 hour a day job for me, so when we moved to our lake house, I needed a break and planned to retire,” she recalls.

But the lack of good, gooey brownies in the area frustrated her. Having raised five children, she had a lot of practice making brownies during her life, and as a teacher, she even implemented a Brownie Points program. “If the students did well, I would bring in a large tray of brownies and everyone seemed to love them,” she explains.

In 2004, she opened an out-of-the-kitchen business using “a special recipe that was similar to one my mom had used, but I changed it a bit,” she says. Once the general public got a chance to try them, the demand was so great she had to open a larger space in Fort Andross, Brunswick, Maine.

Today, she has close to 20 employees and business is booming. “We do everything by hand. We bake in small batches. The only machine we have is to cut the shapes. We even package by hand. We believe that the batch size determines the flavor, so we do batch sizes not much different than those people bake at home,” says Beaulier, who compares her role as CEO to teaching. “I think being a teacher is all about caring about people. And if you care about the kids, they can do anything. It’s the same for business. If you care about your employees, they’ll do anything for you and if you care about your customers, they’ll keep coming back.” –Denise Shoukas

Denise Shoukas is a regular foodspring.com contributor and is the author of foodspring’s food forager blog.