CHEF PROFILES | MIAMI

From Psychology to Pastry: How Marianne Focke of Blend Cookies Baked Her Way from London to Miami

By Eric Barton | Oct. 16, 2025

AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.

Marianne Focke has spent much of her life trying to understand what makes people happy. At first, that meant studying the human mind, first with a master’s in clinical psychology from King’s College London and then working as a psychosocial assessor at the Colombian Consulate. But somewhere between late-night study sessions and afternoon baking breaks, she realized her therapy might not come from a couch. It might come from a cookie.

“I grew up baking with my mother and grandmothers,” she told me. “It’s how we connected as a family.” When she was a teenager in Colombia, she sold brownies and cakes to her classmates—her first taste of what it meant to give comfort in edible form. “To share and receive something someone made for you is a beautiful gesture,” she said. “It helps people feel connected, surrounded by love.”

That sense of connection eventually became the blueprint for Blend Cookies, her Madrid-born, now Miami-based bakery concept that’s part pastry lab, part emotional experiment. Her philosophy is simple: cookies can be therapy, if you do them right.

Marianne Focke

Focke’s story doesn’t follow a neat recipe. She built a steady, respectable life in psychology before deciding to start again—at zero. “After finishing my master’s, I realized I needed to do something that brought me pure happiness,” she said. “That’s when I enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu.”

There, she learned to channel her empathy through flavor instead of words. “Psychology taught me about emotions,” she said. “Pastry became another way to explore them—through texture, through taste.” Baking, for her, is mindfulness in motion. “You have to be present with all your senses,” she said. “It’s a form of meditation.”

After graduating, she entered London’s rarefied pastry world, where precision is gospel and failure comes in grams, not mistakes. Her first stop: Dominique Ansel’s bakery, home of the cronut and the kind of cultish innovation that rewrote pastry’s rulebook. “The level of creativity there was incredible,” she said. “Dominique could take something ordinary and make it extraordinary.”

Marianne Focke Blend Miami Ice Cream Sandwich

Next came Cakes & Bubbles at Hotel Café Royal, the creation of Albert Adrià—known to food obsessives as the mind behind El Bulli’s desserts. There, Focke helped craft sweets so refined they bordered on sculpture. “Luxury isn’t about excess,” she said. “It’s about excellence.”

She followed that with stints at London’s five-star temples of pastry—Claridge’s, The Connaught, The Carlton Tower Jumeirah—where she perfected the quiet choreography of high tea service and learned from some of Europe’s best, including Jérôme Béraudo and Elissavet Kermanidou. Each stop, she said, taught her something new about discipline and joy. “Precision doesn’t kill creativity,” she said. “It gives it structure.”

When Focke co-founded Blend Cookies in Madrid in 2023, she wanted to merge those lessons—rigor and emotion, mindfulness and indulgence. Within months, Tapas Magazine named Blend one of the best cookie shops in the city, and Time Out Madrid called it a revelation. Now she’s brought it to Miami, her first American outpost, where she’s betting that even in a city saturated with sweets, there’s room for something made with purpose.

“At Blend, we merge the American love for cookies with the refinement of European pastry,” she said. “We’re not trying to imitate—it’s about merging worlds.”

That’s what she’s been doing all along: fusing mind and matter, psychology and pastry. Each stuffed cookie is a small act of joy, designed to make you feel something—comfort, nostalgia, maybe even calm.

“Pastry,” she said, “is still about emotions. Just the edible kind.”