🍪 Order Up! A Conversation with Ashley Cameron, Founder of Love & Cookies, Mom of Three, and Heart-Health Advocate
Ashley on growing up on a pecan farm, baking through her son’s heart diagnosis, and how Love & Cookies came to be.
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Founder Ashley Cameron on family, healing, and Love & Cookies
In 2019, Ashley Cameron’s five-year-old son Charlie spent months at home recovering from Kawasaki disease, an inflammatory heart condition that nearly went unrecognized. After treatment, Ashley asked Charlie what was the one thing he wanted to do, his answer was simple, “bake cookies with mommy.” So thats what they did. Cookies, dozens at a time, every flavor he could think of. Some afternoons there were a hundred cooling on the counter.
Ashley grew up on a pecan farm in New Mexico, where her grandmother and mother baked cookies most nights of the week — with lots of recipes featuring pecans, of course. She trained as a labor and delivery nurse and spent years delivering babies. The cookie company wasn’t planned. It was what she and Charlie did to fill the days. When friends started asking to buy them, then COVID hit and the requests didn’t stop, the home operation outgrew its kitchen. Today, Love & Cookies is a clean-label, butter-based frozen cookie dough sold at Sprouts, Wegmans, H-E-B, and Thrive Market. The recipes are her grandmother’s and her mother’s. The name came from her husband Cash, walking into the kitchen one night and saying, “There’s nothing better than a mommy’s love and a really good cookie.”
Ashley talked with us about the slow, scary road to Charlie’s diagnosis — the missed signs, the visit with a high-school friend that may have saved his life. She explained why Charlie’s story now lives on the back of every package, and how the Kawasaki Kids Foundation backpack program grew out of that decision. And she gave us her case for real butter.
The story isn’t a tidy redemption arc. It’s about what families do when there’s nothing else to do, and how that ordinary time can turn into something none of them planned for.
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A Conversation with Ashley Cameron, Founder of Love & Cookies
Introduce Yourself: I’m Ashley Cameron, owner and founder of Love & Cookies. I’m a mom of three: Charlie, who’s about to be 12, Carlysle, who’s almost 10, and Hank, who’s 8. Boy, girl, boy. I’ve been married to my husband for fifteen years this June. We met our freshman year of college.
Love & Cookies is pre-portioned gourmet cookie dough that you’ll find in the freezer aisle at grocery stores across the country — clean label, butter-based, made with all the things you want and none of the things you don’t. The goal is simple: become America’s next favorite cookie, and end up in everyone’s freezer.
Tell us about baking with your mom and grandmother growing up. What stayed with you?
I grew up on a pecan farm in New Mexico, and my grandparents lived on the same property. From the time I was very small, my grandparents had dinner with us five nights a week, sometimes seven. My grandma is about to be 90!
When you grow up on a farm, you’re raised a little differently. You use what you have. The food in our house was always good. And my mom and my grandma made these incredible cookies — every cookie had pecans in it, naturally.
What I remember most isn’t the baking. It’s our friends coming over, the joy on everyone’s face, and eating Miss Susan’s and Miss Betty’s cookies until the trays were empty. That’s the core memory.
Your kids are growing up around those same recipes, but now they’re a business. Has that changed how they relate to baking?
Let me set the tone for our house: five type-A personalities under one roof. The opinions are strong, they don’t always match up, and you can imagine what dinner is like.
The big shift is with Charlie. He’s started cooking actual dinners with me this year, and watching that sense of independence grow has been one of the best parts of being his mom. My daughter is starting to come along too — I’ll ask her to peel cucumbers for the salad or slice the carrots. We put music on, we talk about our day. It’s become one of the best parts of the house.
The kids are proud of the cookies in a way that surprises me. They are really proud of what we built and seeing our products on shelf. They’ve had real influence over the recipes from the beginning. We have a pumpkin cookie in our holiday line that I went through a thousand renditions of — they hated every version at first, and now it’s their favorite. There’s still flour everywhere. We still do a lot of R&D together.
What does dinner actually look like at your house on an average weeknight?
Chaos. We’re an active household — sports, soccer practices, the works. So I cook a lot of quick meals built around protein and vegetables. My kids have been good eaters since day one, which I know is a gift.
The standard go-to: grilled chicken over rice with steamed broccoli, teriyaki or sweet chili sauce on top. Rice bowls. We eat that two or three nights a week because it’s easy and everyone’s happy. Charlie is learning how to grill, so sometimes that turns into a steak night.
Six out of seven nights, we eat dinner together. It’s probably my favorite part of the day.
You’re a former labor and delivery nurse. Tell us about Charlie’s Kawasaki disease diagnosis and what that journey was like.
This is a loaded question. A lot of mixed feelings, because his road to a diagnosis was not straightforward.
A quick primer: Kawasaki disease is an inflammatory heart condition in kids. Symptoms include a high fever for 7 to 10 days, bloodshot eyes with no drainage, a “strawberry tongue” where the blood vessels rupture, swollen and peeling hands and feet, and sometimes a full-body rash. You don’t have to have all of them. In severe cases it can cause aneurysms and lasting damage to the heart.
Charlie was five. He got sick on Halloween night of 2019, in the middle of kindergarten. The fever spiked overnight to a scary high. The next day he was barely moving. I was a nurse, but my background was OB — I’d delivered babies. I had read about Kawasaki maybe once or twice in school. It wasn’t on my radar.
We took him to the doctor. They said it was probably a virus. By the next visit, his hands were swollen and peeling. The doctor mentioned Kawasaki — but Charlie had tested positive for two other viruses, so they decided that was the explanation. By Friday he was so dehydrated we had to take him to the ER. They gave him fluids and sent us home.
Then it was Thanksgiving, and we drove to New Mexico to be with my family. He didn’t have a fever anymore but he wasn’t himself. Pale. Sleeping constantly. While we were there, my daughter got an ear infection. I called my high-school friend, who’s the local pediatrician, to fit her in. He asked if anyone else in the house was sick. I described Charlie’s whole story. He said, “Has anyone talked to you about Kawasaki disease? Nine times out of ten when I’ve seen this, that virus can actually trigger it. The worst thing that happens if you go get an echocardiogram is they tell you his heart is normal.”
If he hadn’t said that to me, I don’t know that I would have followed up. I would have just thought he was bouncing back slowly.
We scheduled the echo for the Monday we got home. This is where being a nurse came in — I’ve been in enough ultrasounds to know that when something’s wrong, it starts taking too long. We were 45 minutes in. An hour. Charlie was being a trooper.
Charlie had significant dilation in multiple coronary arteries. Three of his four heart valves were leaking. His left ventricle wasn’t working the way it should. The doctor — who happened to be the Kawasaki specialist — looked at me and said, “No wonder he doesn’t feel good.” We were inside the 30-day window, which meant they could still treat him with IVIG to try to stop the inflammation.
He was admitted that day. Two days of IVIG, which has hard side effects — he ended up back in the hospital with aseptic meningitis afterward. Then years of at-home treatments to support his heart healing.
I have this core memory from when I was 20 weeks pregnant with him, the doctor pointed at the ultrasound and said, “Look at this textbook picture of a heart.” That moment kept coming back to me. His heart was so perfect once and it changed in an instant.
Baking with you became a huge part of his recovery. What was it about that time together?
Charlie was on so many medications he couldn’t go anywhere. I would have taken him to Disneyland the same day if he’d asked. But he just wanted to make cookies with me. Every time.
The name actually came from one of those days. We’d baked easily a hundred cookies. My husband walked in, looked at the counter, and said, “There’s nothing better than a mommy’s love and a really good cookie.” I went, “Love & Cookies.”
Love & Cookies was born.
What’s your advice for parents going through their own hard season — a diagnosis, a loss, a long stretch of uncertainty?
Two things.
First, find your people. Find a support group, find others going through it, lean on the village. Especially if you have other kids. I had two other children to keep parenting through this, and I needed people around me who could help carry that.
Second, give yourself permission to let other things go. The house being a mess didn’t matter. The laundry not being done didn’t matter. I had to consciously say: this is the priority. Everything else can wait.
When did baking with Charlie shift from this is helping us heal to this could be a real business?
It was gradual. We were coming up with crazy flavors together, learning what worked and what didn’t. A friend asked if I’d bring some to a team party. Then someone asked to buy them. I said, “I’ll just make them for you.” She said, “No, no — I want to pay you.”
That started a ripple. Charlie and I did it for fun — little bakery boxes, him as delivery boy. A tiny home-kitchen operation.
Then COVID hit. I assumed people would stop wanting cookies but the opposite happened. The home business exploded so fast that within nine months I’d broken six KitchenAid mixers. I had a 20-quart commercial mixer on my kitchen counter and flour on every surface. My husband finally said, “This isn’t working anymore.”
We found a 900-square-foot space in our community where I could bake. That was the turning point. People kept asking if we’d sell the cookie dough. So we did.
I’ll add this: our retail partners really care about clean ingredients — Sprouts, Thrive Market, Misfits, H-E-B, Wegmans. They’re known for being picky about quality. That says something about the product itself.
Every Love & Cookies flavor is named after someone in your life. How do you decide who?
It’s special to have a cookie named after you. I mean, it’s fun. Our chocolate chip cookie is the Charlie Cass — Charlie’s full name. We call it the OG, the cookie that started it all.
Other flavors are named after my other kids. My husband’s name is Cash, so when you put our names together, you get Cashly — and yes, we have a Cashly cookie. From there, it grew to family and close friends, mostly people who really showed up for us when Charlie was sick. The village I keep talking about. They were so excited.
You use pasture-raised eggs, European butter, unbleached flour, no preservatives. How do you think about clean ingredients without making parents feel like every snack is a moral test?
Our product is still very much a cookie. But I’m confident in what’s in it.
Unbleached flour, so no chemicals. 100% real butter — because butter can come with additives and partially hydrogenated oils, and you don’t want those. Clean, simple chocolate. Pure cane organic sugar. Real eggs, real vanilla. Nothing artificial, no added preservatives or food dyes
The whole idea is: if you’re going to bake cookies with your family, these are the ingredients you’d reach for anyway. It’s still a cookie. It’s still a moment of joy. With a busier life — and I’m feeling that more as my kids get older — I can’t always do it from scratch the way I want to. I love that I can pull these out of the freezer, that Charlie can bake them himself.
Life is balance. If you’re going to have a sweet, it might as well be a good one.
Baking with kids sounds magical. It also looks like flour everywhere and raw egg on the floor. What’s the reality?
One of the actual benefits of frozen cookie dough is that you skip the mess — but the mess has its own value too.
I’ll be real: when they were little, of course there were times I was frustrated. “Why is there flour on top of my head? Did you really have to drop that egg again?” I’m a human. I have a big personality. So yes, there were those moments.
But at the end of the day, we ended up with a really good product and a really good time. Everyone got something out of it.
Love & Cookies partners with the Kawasaki Kids Foundation and sends cookies to newly diagnosed families through your backpack program. What does it feel like to be on the giving side now?
I was raised in a very giving family. My parents put their time and energy into others, and that shaped me. So when we started this, I knew if it became a real business, it should also be for a good cause.
The most powerful piece is awareness. Charlie’s story is on the back of every bag. People Google Kawasaki disease because of it. I get a handful of emails every year — I’m not exaggerating — from people who say, “I read your story, I bought your product, and six months later my child or grandchild was diagnosed. We knew what to look out for and ask for because of you.”
That is why we do this. It doesn’t matter how many cookies we sell. If we can help save a kid’s heart, that’s the whole thing.
We’re so lucky Charlie is doing well. Not every family is. We want to support the ones who aren’t.
Charlie is thriving now. He’s been described as the family jokester. What does he make of his story being on the back of every cookie bag?
He’s actually my most introverted of the three. He gets excited in small groups but goes shy in public. He thinks the bag is cool. He likes being able to share his story. When the brand first launched and he was little, he asked, “Mom, am I famous?” I told him, yeah, buddy. You’re famous.
One cooking skill or technique you think every home cook should know?
Butter. I cook with a lot of butter. I don’t use a ton of oils, or beef tallow. There are so many clean options for greasing and substituting, and butter actually makes food taste better. That’s the one. Use real butter. Skip the spray pans and the nonstick stuff. Keep your food as clean and good as you can.