Standing behind four glass cookie jars lined up under a yellow and black market tent, Anne Marie Parker Baker jokes that her new middle name is “the.”

As in “Annie the Baker.”

Baker is a former accountant who trained as a pastry chef at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone and worked for five and a half years at Mustards, most of them as head pastry chef. Last year, she decided it was time for a change.

So the accomplished baker, who prefers cookie dough to the finished product, embarked on a quest for what she considers the perfect cookie.

“I started playing,” she admitted, then launched into an impassioned explanation with the energy and good humor that friends consider Annie Baker trademarks. “I said to myself, ‘I want to make a puffy cookie, a cookie that’s doughy and moist, not flat, not crispy’ ... Think about it. You eat the cookie dough, it’s great but it doesn’t taste like the cookie after. It’s a totally different animal.”

While she was “playing” she discovered if she reduced the amount of butter and adjusted the sugar she could get the balance, texture and puffiness she was looking for. A hot pink ice cream scoop helped out with the rounded shape.

Enlisting tasters

Then, in typical Baker fashion, she got friends and family involved, including her nine nephews and nieces, by enlisting them as tasters. Emphatic encouragement from former farmers market manager Lassa Skinner led to Baker’s appearance at both the Napa and St. Helena markets.

Next came the painful part, getting permits, renting a kitchen, learning the market regulations. A farmers market veteran, Erika Heinemann, who started Savvy Wine Foods, took Baker under her wing and helped her maneuver the bureaucratic maze.

This May, Baker set up her booth, lined up the round cookie jars filled with four flavors of 2-ounce puffy cookies and waited. Even at 7:30 a.m. there were takers. By noon, the cookie jars were empty. That’s 180 cookies at the Friday St. Helena market and 130 cookies each Tuesday and Saturday at the Napa market.

Her stall is hard to miss, topped as it is by the yellow and black Pittsburgh Steelers awning — she and her husband, Jim, are avid fans of all the Pittsburgh teams — with the addition during hockey season of Penny, a stuffed animal representing the Pittsburgh Penguins mascot. It’s the size of a healthy 4-year-old and outfitted with stick, helmet and skates.

The Bakers are both from Pittsburgh — “born and raised,” Annie Baker likes to say — but they met in Chicago. Jim Baker was the Information Technology guy at the bank where his future wife was an assistant vice president. Two words brought them together.

“Our cubicles were near each other,” said Baker, who has a treasure trove of family stories. “So we met and I asked him one question, ‘Who is your absolute favorite hockey player?’ He said, ‘Mario LeMieux.’ I knew we were meant to be.”

(LeMieux, for less avid sports fans, is the only player to win hockey’s Stanley Cup as both a player and an owner. He won it again recently as an owner.)

Coordinates demonstrations

In addition to preparing cookies for three markets, Baker coordinates chef demonstrations for the Thursday Chefs Market in Napa, mentors those interested in opening farmers market stalls and takes on the occasional secretarial chores for friends and former colleagues — chefs Pablo and Erasto Jacinto, formerly of Mustard’s and Cindy’s Backstreet Kitchen and now of The Border in Napa.

Baker, whose career path from an assistant bank vice president to baker is as convoluted as an avid storyteller could wish, was always a cookie baker. It was something she learned at her grandmother’s side — another Ann who created miracles with a silver Sunbeam mixer. Her grandmother died when her namesake was still a child but the talent and love of baking remained, to the delight of Baker’s bank colleagues.

But baking was never more than a way to relax and deflate the pressures of long work weeks, she said. It wasn’t until her husband had relocated to the Bay Area and the couple were celebrating their sixth wedding anniversary in the Napa Valley that Baker went headlong down a new career path.

Just outside St. Helena, they noticed a former winery. Baker was intrigued by the massive Greystone building, discovered it was the Culinary Institute’s West Coast branch and decided she was ready to return to school.

The defining moment came a few months later, she recalled, when she was sitting in the baking science class.

‘Cookie like a brick’

“I was having one of those ‘aha’ moments. I thought ‘that’s why my cookie turned out like a brick.’ I thought, ‘I’m so happy; this is so me.’”

She also credits biochemist and author Shirley Corriher’s “BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Baking.” 

Creating the puffy cookie dough Baker was looking for required understanding each ingredient and its reaction when mixed with the other elements, Baker said.

“I started reading about each ingredient and writing pages and pages of notes,” she said. “When Jim came home there would be a different cookie to taste. ‘Oh that’s good,’ he’d say. But I’d say, ‘Oh, no.’ He wasn’t as critical as I was.”

Then one day, she changed the ratio of ingredients in the toffee and milk chocolate cookie dough and the result was just the puffy cookie she had in mind.

Since then, she has created a oatmeal and chocolate chip cookie, a peanut butter cookie with mini peanut butter cups, and a semisweet chocolate chip cookie. In the works — a variation of the oatmeal cookie, an inside-out snickerdoodle and something with molasses.

But fans of Annie the Baker will have to wait for those. On a recent Sunday, she was in the commercial kitchen cooking up a storm in preparation for an out-of-town wedding.

“I was told, ‘You better bring cookies, otherwise we’re not letting you in the door.’”