Using his entrepreneurial skills and a lifelong passion for all things cooking and baking, a Vicksburg resident opened a new bakery this year located downtown.

Barrett Scott grew up in Memphis with his holidays centered around cooking with family. Now in Vicksburg with his wife Lauren, Scott opened The Sweets-Easy in March after they spent time experimenting with cookie recipes in 2020.

His wife was the first of the pair to venture from a mainstream cookie recipe when she was out of vanilla while baking one day. She substituted the ingredient with Amaretto and created her own version of the cookie — white chocolate-mini chocolate chip with Amaretto. Later, she asked Scott to bake a batch of her new recipe only to come home, take a bite and exclaim how much better his cookies were.

“I was following her recipe to the tee, but I just tweaked one little thing where I let the dough sit just for a little bit longer,” Scott said. “I let it chill for a little bit and let the flavor come together. That is the biggest thing with any baking. The longer you have to let the dough sit, the more the flavor will mix together.”

Located in The Vicksburg Apartments building on Clay Street, Scott sells his cookies, along with several brownies and bread recipes, from 2 to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday and noon to 4 p.m. on Saturdays. He rotates between over 20 recipes mostly created by him with the exception of two or three recipes created by his wife.

“At any given time, we have about seven or eight (types of cookies),” Scott said. “We usually always have our Jameson Chocolate Chip, Honeysuckle Sugar Cookies, and Red Velvet, which is our big seller.”

What’s the unique element to Scott’s cookies? Alcohol. Each cookie has a different alcohol in its recipe. Parents have no need to worry, however. The cookies are completely safe and free of alcohol when children have a taste. The alcohol bakes out in the oven, but, it has an effect that benefits the cookies.

“The alcohol adds a little bit of fluffiness,” Scott said. “On top of that, you get a bit of extra flavor from whatever (alcohol) you put in. Usually, we try to aim for it to pair well with whatever we’re fixing, such as the Amaretto with the M&Ms so you get that sweet and chocolatey flavor.”

Though each cookie recipe does contain alcohol, Scott said they also have “virgin desserts” for those who don’t wish for alcohol to be present in the recipe upon request.

Scott said while the word has been a bit slower getting out about his business than he’d like, once a customer finds him, they become repeat customers quite quickly.

“I think part of the reason for that is people finding out where we are and what we do,” Scott said. “Once they try it for the first time, they come in multiple times. It is just that getting them in that first time takes a bit of time.”

Located on the ground level of The Vicksburg, The Sweets-Easy’s Facebook page also includes a video guiding customers through the building and to the kitchen if you have trouble locating the store. In the future, Scott is hoping to open a storefront on Washington Street that will be a full-blown sweets shop complete with candy by the pound for tourists to also enjoy. But for now, Scott said his entire goal is just to provide excellent customer service to his community in Vicksburg.

“The biggest thing and what I’ve always learned is the servant mentality,” Scott said. “I want to create that servant mindset here and help people out. But also just creating a little bit of joy. It is really easy to have that warm cookie and enjoy it.”

Scott was a teacher for a short time and said he’s always felt the need to serve school faculty and teachers. Therefore, he is currently offering a giveaway for customers to serve their teachers. With each purchase, a customer gets one school giveaway entry to vote for their school’s teachers to receive 10 dozen cookies. The giveaway runs through Aug. 28 and the cookies will be delivered within three days.

For catering inquiries, large orders or any order needed outside of regular business hours, Scott asks that customers contact him either through his Facebook page or by giving him a call at 901-896-8162.