ELLSWORTH – Marlee’s Bake Shop, a popular dessert food trailer, will be debuting its new brick and mortar location on Ellsworth’s Main Street in mid-February.

Owner/baker Josie Erlandson, who operates the food truck and a cookie line called Frosted Haven, has dreamed of having her own bakery for years and hard work is making that dream come true.

“I’ve been looking for a brick and mortar for a while and there was just nothing and everything was a dead end,” Erlandson said. “I gave up for a while. I planned to do just the food trailer for a couple more seasons.”

But then fate intervened. She saw the space at 355 W. Main St. had become available (it most recently housed Sarcastic Sisters) on Facebook Marketplace. Her friend, who operates That Girl Brie in River Falls, sent her the listing and encouraged her to pursue it.

“I signed the lease at the first walkthrough,” Erlandson said. “There were multiple offers and I just knew. I had this weird nudge that I needed to sign this lease. I think it might have been a nudge from Marlee. I’m not even like that, I could’ve gone home to think about it.”

The inspiration behind Marlee’s Bake Shop is her and husband James’s daughter Marlee May, who died in February 2018 after battling Alveolar Rhabdomyosarcoma, a soft tissue cancer that spread to her brain. She was just 2 years old. However, she lived a full and impactful life, following her dreams to complete her bucket list, touching the hearts of all who knew her.

“Ever since Mar was sick and the community helped us, I’ve wanted to give back and memorialize her in some way. But I didn’t know how to do that. This can be the way that I attempt to give back,” Erlandson said in June. “I’ll never be able to repay everybody, but this will be my way of giving back to the community.”

Her offerings will include fresh baked cookies, brownies, cinnamon rolls, donuts and croissants, along with a deconstructed dessert line (cake chunks in a cup layered with frosting, dirt cups, cheesecake cups), dirty sodas, local ice cream from the UW-River Falls Falcon Dairy and Babcock Dairy at UW-Madison, gourmet popcorn and Door County coffee.

“I love making dirty sodas and I find making the croissants rewarding (they take three days),” Erlandson said.

She also plans to introduce a low sugar dirty soda line, inspired by a diabetic child who came to her food trailer wanting a dirty soda. They can be made with sugar free sodas and syrups.

The shop will also include a small retail space, featuring quality items used and handpicked by Erlandson.

“We’ll carry some products that we actually use in our menu,” she said. “We’ll never claim to be the cheapest, but we really focus on the quality of the menu. We do a lot of recipe testing, so people aren’t getting sub-par products.”

Erlandson said the community support she has received is unmatched.

“The local business owners have been great, whether you’re down in East End or up here,” she said. “There’s been overwhelming excitement. On our social media (Facebook and Instagram), we’ve been releasing sneak peeks of what we’ll have. We had such a good trailer season. Just the overwhelming response there, of happy customers. For it being our first year, it seemed to go really well.”

Her husband and two sons, Boone and Axl, have also been supportive.

“The boys seem excited. We’re going to be getting up early some days,” Erlandson said. “James is quietly supportive. He never complains when I ask for help; he goes above and beyond to help me. That’s a gift in itself. If the shoe was on the other foot, I would probably be complaining about moving freezers in the winter.”

As for the new shop, Erlandson is creating a space where people are comfortable and want to hang out. She wants people to leave happier than when they came in. To her, there’s nothing like walking into a bakery, the smells in the air, the array of goodies spread out in a glass case, the cozy, nostalgic atmosphere.

“I want the whole thing to be a bakery experience that you can’t really find anywhere else,” she said.

The bake shop is another way to keep Marlee’s memory alive. Erlandson said she named her bakery after Marlee so she could say her name every day. Marlee loved to bake with her grandma and to make popcorn with her grandpa.

“I think the thing that really sets this place apart is people can gather here,” she said. “It’s going to be a fun space and feel like home. It’s my goal with this space that everybody leaves happier than when they came.”

One way to do that is to hand out “Marlee moments” to people who might be having an off day. It might be a discount coupon, a sticker, anything to bring smiles.

“We have an opportunity for making someone’s day better with something so small,” Erlandson said. “I have different ideas that I want to implement that will give people an opportunity to pay things forward, but also for us to make days better.”

Erlandson is devoting herself full-time to her new venture. Her last day as a legal assistant at Rodli, Beskar, Neuhaus, Murray & Pletcher S.C. in River Falls was Jan. 22.

“It feels weird to leave a job you love, it seems counterintuitive. I know that if I want to do this, I have to go all in. My bosses were super supportive,” she said.

She will also be operating the food trailer during the warmer months.

A grand opening for the storefront is in the works, along with an Ellsworth Area Chamber of Commerce ribbon cutting, so watch their social media for updates.

Marlee’s Bake Shop will be open Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays at 7 a.m. to start. More hours may be added. For more information, visit marleesbakeshop.com