Every Saturday afternoon, Tangela Adenekan receives an important phone call.
“Grandma, what time is it?” the tiny voice on the other end asks. Ms. Adenekan pretends to forget.
“It’s Cookie Jar time!” says Alexandria Jordan, 4, gleefully.
Just before 3 p.m. one recent Saturday along bustling Forest Avenue in the West Brighton section of Staten Island, the door swung open into a heady den of chocolate, butter and sugar. In walked Alexandria, her mother, her grandmother and her grandfather. They ducked around the other customers and headed to the case containing the familiar rainbow cookie, reimagined as a petit four wrapped in dark chocolate.
“This,” said Ms. Adenekan, 56, “is a wonderful place to come.”
The Cookie Jar opened in 2007, the first spinoff from CakeChef, a 25-year-old bakery up the road owned by James and Maria Carrozza. Last year, the Carrozzas opened Piece-A-Cake on New Dorp Lane, extending their baking empire.
The inside of the Cookie Jar is inviting for more than its caloric aroma. One of the store’s brick walls is stocked, from floor to tin ceiling, with colorful ceramic jars — from Snoopy’s doghouse to a fire-engine-red high-heeled shoe to traditional Italian biscotti pottery. There are four marble-top tables for lingering, and stairs leading to an open kitchen where customers can watch longtime employees like Rolando Ramirez, 42, roll dough.
Across from a Chinese restaurant and the Drunken Monkey (a bar owned by Angela Raiola, a.k.a. Big Ang of the reality TV show “Mob Wives”), the Cookie Jar has found its niche. And this is its high season.
“December is cookie month,” said Mr. Carrozza, 50. “As we get closer to Christmas week, it becomes mayhem.”
Danielle Napolitano, 42, settles downstairs into the workshop, wrapping assortments for gifts. A local dentist had bought 30 of them for clients and associates — a gift that keeps giving. A contractor had placed an order for the private sanitation company he uses.
Mr. Carrozza says he uses unadulterated ingredients (no shortening) to create bases for the more than 100 types of cookies he sells. No matter what kind of cookie customers choose — from brownie bites layered with chocolate chip cookies and Oreos to rainbow-sprinkled butter cookies — they all cost the same: $11 a pound.
The Carrozza family has always revolved around the oven. James was working as a baker in Manhattan when he first met Maria, who was selling Italian ice at a bakery in Brooklyn, where they both grew up. He was 22; she was 16.
In 1990, two years after working 15-hour days to make CakeChef viable on Jewett Avenue, James proposed to Maria at the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center. He brought in a cake he made, the words on the frosting popping the question.
Two children and 15 years later, the Carrozzas began thinking expansion when demand for their cookies outweighed supply from one display case at CakeChef. Downstairs, Mr. Carrozza had a basement full of 1,000 cookie jars, which he had been collecting from local yard sales.
The couple gut-renovated a building on Forest Avenue and built shelves for the jars, which Ms. Carrozza, 44, decided she would sell and ship with cookies inside. The original 1,000 were gone within a year. They still add jars to their collection.
In part to thank his wife, Mr. Carrozza created a cookie and named it for her. The Maria has raspberry jam, almonds and dark chocolate drizzle.
Salvatore, 18, the couple’s older son, is a supervisor at CakeChef, while his brother, Armando, 13, helps clean at all three locations. Both are improbably thin, despite indulging out of love and duty.
For Salvatore, the whiff of chocolate and dough has become like air. “I don’t even smell it anymore,” he said, shrugging.
