Jesse Lomax Floyd comes to Brooklyn by way of
Pittsburgh, PA and Greenville, SC. Her unique culinary aesthetic was cultivated
at grandmothers Louise and Pauline's elbows, colored by her mother’s kitchen, and refined by her
own fascination with the science of the natural world, art, and history.
Jesse studied Biology in college with a focus on Botany and Evolutionary Ecology. She worked with AmeriCorps, providing hands-on urban environmental education and leadership to high school students. Then she continued to hone her passion for food, people and policy during a stint as nutrition educator at a food bank. When she moved to New York City in 2005, Jesse began an underground blog to record her experiments with baked goods and to create a forum for her interests in cooking, history, and paper-crafts. She quickly gathered an audience of readers and slowly began taking individual orders for some of the recipes featured there. Lomaxine was born.
Jesse is passionate about baking and likens it to time spent in the biology lab. "There's a lot of prep work and details, but you also have to be able to see the whole picture." She is currently working out of a shared entrepreneur space in Long Island city, with long days spent chopping fresh ginger or zesting oranges. Some of the cookies are made icebox style – rolling the dough into perfect tubes and then slicing them to perfection before they go into the oven.
The varieties are based loosely on recipes she's been baking for years with family, like the ginger cookies, but taken to a whole new level after experimentation (i.e. adding fresh ginger – why not? she thought). "Most importantly, the cookies I wind up making are flavors I like to eat – strong flavored stuff with a point of view"
Jesse's a self-described packaging freak and has really enjoyed developing her signature look. The company emblem – the buffalo – represents strength and beauty in the unexpected. Her cookies are indeed beautiful, bold and unexpectedly, almost shockingly, good.
She hopes enough people agree so she can move on from her day job at an architecture firm and bake full time in her own kitchen.
