Tate's Cookie Queen Brings Her Story to Life Through Children's Book

North Sea’s very own Cookie Queen, Kathleen King, is releasing a children’s book that chronicles the “obsession” with cookies she’s had since she was 11-years-old, and how the quest for the perfect recipe – and the lessons she learned from her farmer parents – lit the spark that turned her charming little Southampton bakery, Tate’s Bake Shop, into a national baked goods empire.

King’s new book, Cookie Queen: How One Girl Started Tate’s Bake Shop, will be in bookstores Tuesday, July 18. It’s the “delicious true story of how a little girl’s dream turned into an enormous cookie empire,” explains a release from publisher Random House.

As a child on her family’s North Sea farm, King famously caught the baking bug, and by the time she was 11, she was experimenting with different chocolate chip recipes — less flour, more butter, longer baking time — until she landed on the one that brought customers flocking to her parents’ farmstead, where she sold her soon-t0-be-famous creations from a fold-out card table.

While that part of her story is well-known, King was clear that selling her cookies was not her version of a summertime lemonade stand – the entrepreneurial spirit she embraced was needed to buy the things she wanted, like new clothes for school.

Kathleen King Talks Tate’s & Cookie Queen

“On a farm, the minute you start walking is the minute you start working,” said King, who still lives in North Sea. “By the time I was 11, it wasn’t my first rodeo, I’d already been working on the farm, doing laundry, making dinner, doing chores … it kind of made me who I am. It was definitely, ‘You’re old enough to buy your own clothes for school, so get out there and work.’”

According to King, her parents were the driving force behind her work ethic and motivation. “They made me take risks and get out there and believe in myself and my own abilities. I was a totally average young girl — I wasn’t athletic, I wasn’t really pretty, I had really nothing major going for me … but what my parents gave me, that fierce kind of warrior feeling, was irreplaceable for me.”

In 1980, when she was only 20, King’s mother showed her some tough love. “It was the last summer I was going to make cookies in her kitchen,” King said, explaining what her mother told her. “She wanted to know, What were my plans? I said, ‘I don’t know,’ and she said there’s a bakery for rent in town, why don’t you check that out.”

And that’s how the little bake shop on North Sea Road went on to make big noise across the country. Nowadays, Tate’s has a full line of traditional American baked goods, and every recipe was perfected by the now-retired King herself, and still baked from scratch.

The enormous, buttery chocolate chip cookies were the foundation of King’s incredible farmstead-to-boardroom story, and today Tate’s – named after her father – is a half-a-billion-dollar company, and King’s iconic cookies are sold all over the country.

While she’s no longer involved, the Southampton Village bake shop has become a destination for locals and tourists alike. Consistently voted best bakery in the Hamptons, The New York Times noted that the bakery was a destination “worth putting miles on the odometer.”

The book is written with Lowey Bundy Sichol and illustrated by Ramona Kaulitzki; it also includes an original recipe for molasses cookies. King will be signing copies of Cookie Queen at Tate’s Bake Shop in Southampton (43 North Sea Road) on Sunday, August 6 at 11 a.m.

“To see [the book] come alive was really fun,” King said. “What I would like the book to really inspire is, whatever it is you do, give your best. To me it’s that easy. If you’re the dishwasher, do your best, because one day you’re going to move up the ladder because someone is going to recognize how well you’re doing.”

Find Cookie Queen: How One Girl Started Tate’s Bake Shop at your local bookstore or online.