My cakes, cupcakes & cookies are known for their delicious, truly authentic taste. My new cookbook will up your baking game. Promise!

I'm Mary Lee Montfort, and I started baking professionally at the Union Bay Café in Seattle, Washington, under chef/owner Mark Manley, where I was one of his pantry/line cooks for 2 1/2 years. During that time, I was in charge of baking Mark's desserts, with everything made in-house. From that experience, I gained the confidence to open my own business (9 years later and 3,000 miles away!).

Mary Lee's Desserts opened in July 2004 as a very small home-based, fully licensed baking business in Vienna, Virginia. My little dessert business allowed me to be creative, to do something that made people happy, and to still be at home for my family.

As I added more and more clients, my holiday baking regularly exceeded 1,000 cookies, and my Cupcake Carousel events had me making over 250 at a time. My layer cakes harkened back to a time when a cake really tasted homemade, and there were families who had me make their special birthday cakes each and every year. I just loved that!

As my business grew, I was lucky to have caught the eye of restaurant critic and food writer David Hagedorn. David was gracious enough to include me three different times in the Washington Post's Food Section. In December 2011, two of my cookie recipes were featured in the Post's Annual Holiday Cookie Issue. My M&M Bar Cookie recipe captured the #1 spot for the most viewed and downloaded of all of the Post's recipes for the entire year of 2012 ("Readers' Top Picks")!

Later, as the creator and chair of the Human Rights Campaign's Chefs for Equality Galas in Washington D.C., David invited me to participate as a swag bag contributor where my treats were routinely one of the only homemade items. The last time I was able to contribute, we were up to 600 swag bags, for which I made three different cookies for each guest's bag. Being even a small part of that event was an honor and a highlight of my baking career.

In late 2017, Jen Morrow, owner of Bards Alley, asked me to bake one weekly cake for the cafe of her new indie bookstore in historic downtown Vienna. That one cake blossomed into weekly cupcakes, cookies, and morning treats. I developed new recipes just for the bookstore and felt so proud to have some of my specialty desserts available in retail for the first time.

I retired from the baking part of my business in August of 2019 when we moved to a much smaller home, and it was no longer feasible for me to continue. I've missed baking for people and the pride of making sure that everything I made was excellent each and every time. I hope that my new cookbook will help bridge that gap and inspire new bakers and experienced bakers alike.

I feel so blessed to share all of the profits from my cookbook sales to charities doing outstanding work. Please click on the Designated Charities page for more details.