The Local newsletter is your free, daily guide to life in Colorado. For locals, by locals.
Shut up, and sit down. We’re going to tell you a little story about Shelby Boolay.
Social media followers of Mother Cookie Cake are familiar with that sentence, since it’s how Boolay starts every one of her home baking videos. The feisty command is usually followed by thick dollops of homemade buttercream frosting dripping onto a spinning cookie sheet cake while she holds the spatula—always just out of frame. And although she’s posted more than 400 cake-decorating videos online (and amassed more than 646,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok), Boolay insists she is not a real baker. (Shelby Boolay also might not be her real name—asked if it was a pseudonym, she said, “I can neither confirm nor deny.”)
“I don’t know how to bake. You should underline or bold that if this is a written article,” she jokes. “I had only ever baked two things in my entire life before 2025.”
The 35-year-old Fort Collins mother of two started baking and decorating cookie cakes last year to earn an income after being laid off from her tech job. But what began as a culinary side hustle (she raffles off each of her creations) accompanied by unnarrated, ASMR-style videos of her smoothing, piping, and mixing her homemade buttercream frosting morphed into Mother Cookie Cake, a snarky persona beloved by the internet.
“It kind of stemmed from [the fact that] I was seven, eight, nine months pregnant when I started making these videos, and everything was annoying to me,” Boolay says. “And so there was a little bit of pregnancy aggression there, for sure, and that bled into my videos.”
In one voiceover, Mother tells her followers she got kicked off her high school pom squad for having an attitude problem. In another, she says her hair dresser “pooped her pants in the salon” when she found out Mother Cookie Cake was in her chair. As Boolay’s videos became more unhinged, so too did her customers’ confection requests. Instead of traditional birthday treats, clients started requesting cakes shaped like their left ear to celebrate having ear surgery; a one-eyed, three-legged chihuahua for a veterinarian; and a cake adorned with a speculum for a newly graduated gynecologist.
@mothercookiecake of course I gave him two working eyeballs so I had to go back and edit that 🙄 #cookiecake #cakedecorating #cakesoftiktok #asmrfood #fyp ♬ original sound – mothercookiecake
Not only are the desserts delightfully unconventional, but Boolay’s narration is downright hilarious. “In my mind, my first job is a comedian on social media, and my second job is a small business operator,” she says. In less than a year, she gained more than 750,000 followers on social media. She even made a cake for Flavor Flav. These days, her cakes go for $200 a pop.
But what’s perhaps most interesting about her rise to online stardom is that she achieved it all without ever showing her face. For a year, Mother Cookie Cake remained a sassy, faceless home-baking luminary who entertained the masses with her smart mouth and steadily improving buttercream portraits. And despite her followers hounding her for a face reveal for months, Mother refused—until now.
On March 9, the one-year anniversary of starting her account, Boolay casually dropped a video that revealed her face at the end, and her followers are still recovering. “Idk what you’re saying because now you’re constantly distracting us with your pretty face,” one user wrote on TikTok. “Wait. Waaaaaait. WAAAAAAAAAIT. YOU HAVE A FACE?!? I definitely was getting to the point where I was convinced you had some kind of a Harvey Dent situation going on and we’d never see you,” someone commented on Instagram.
Before Mother Cookie Cake’s unmasking gets picked up by Reuters, we sat down with Boolay to talk about all things baking, going viral, and how to score one of her coveted cakes.
Editor’s note: The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
5280: How similar is Shelby Boolay to Mother Cookie Cake? Is it all just a persona or is it based on your real personality?
Shelby Boolay: It’s definitely a character. I realized after I posted semi-aggressive or polarizing voiceovers that it got attention and it got followers. So I was like, OK, that’s how I get people to watch my videos. So it definitely morphed into an attitude that I just carried throughout all of my videos, and it’s really fun to play that character. I do like to say there’s a little bit of me in there. Like, I definitely think that sometimes I can do people’s jobs better than them, but, you know, not doctoring or lawyering, for sure. There’s some truth to it, but for the most part, it’s a character, and that’s what’s fun about it. I’ve kept it going for so long that no one really knows if Shelby is my real name. People are questioning everything about me.
We have to talk about your unconventional cake decorations. Are people requesting these odd cakes specifically or are you taking some creative liberties?
It started out as, like, a pink-and-green nine or a yellow-and-white six for a daughter or son’s birthday. But after my Spongebob [cake video], the requests got progressively weirder. At first, people would send me a picture or a very specific request. And then once I started making these videos and people [realized] I have no idea what I’m doing but that we all love how the cakes turn out anyway, people have stopped giving me direction at all. The cake requests I get now are like: My mom’s name is Nancy, and she loves pigs, and she lives in Idaho. And I’m like, “OK, do you want me to make something up or send you a design? And they’re like, I love not knowing what it’s going to be, and I love how unhinged it becomes.
And so there’s pressure now to make my cakes actually look good, right? I’ll use my projector a lot more and trace images I find on the internet, and they still end up awful, apparently, according to [people on] the internet. But for the most part, people want my style and don’t ask me to trace. They say, “Do Lilo and Stitch, but don’t trace it, just free-hand it,” because they want it to look like I did it. That’s the only thing keeping me in business, honestly—the allure of getting something that will probably never be able to be re-created again.
How can people buy one of your cookie cakes?
In the “before times,” I would take one cake order a day. I’d wake up, make a cake, and let the customer pick it up every single day, seven days a week. And then in the middle of September [2025], I started noticing that my hands were tingling and numb and spazzing; my fingers were locking shut. So I went to the hand doctor, and it turns out I had developed carpal tunnel and trigger finger, which is a very common injury among cake decorators. But he said he usually sees it in seasoned professionals who have been doing this for decades. He said the amount of damage I’ve done to my body in only six months is insane. He encouraged me to find a new profession. But that’s not really an option for me right now; I don’t want to find a new profession. Instead of finding a new profession, I decided to cut way back.
So now I only offer four cakes a month, and I raffle them off to keep it most fair. So on the 15th of every month, I make a post that’s like, “Hey, if you want to be entered into a random drawing to have the opportunity to purchase a cake, just comment down below.” Then I spin the wheel a couple days later and they get randomly selected. The winners message me, tell me what they want, and I send them their invoice [for $200].
The cakes are hard to come by, unfortunately, which makes me sad, but right now, it’s all my body is capable of. Hopefully that changes someday, but for now, that’s how we’re surviving.
Do the cakes taste as good as they look?
I don’t like cookie cakes at all. They’re so disgusting. I ask my customers all the time if they taste good, and they’re like, “Yeah, it’s delicious. I’ve eaten it for the past five days.” And I’m like, Oh my God, vomit.
You hid your face from the internet for a year while amassing a massive following. Why did you choose to do that?
Because I was heavily pregnant, unshowered, and smelly, and I did not want a camera pointed at my face. I did not want to take a shower. I didn’t want to put on makeup. I didn’t want to dry my hair. Any mom who’s been pregnant while caring for a 20-month-old will know exactly what I’m talking about. The last thing I wanted to do was point the camera at my face, which kind of worked out, because it was about the cakes, right? For two months, my videos were just ASMR. It didn’t need to be about my face because it was about the sounds and the cakes that I was making.
Then after a month or so, people were like, What do you sound like? Why aren’t you talking? How do you do this? They had a lot of questions. So I started doing voiceovers but kept filming the same way because I was nine months pregnant. And I am a very private person in general; I don’t love being on camera. I got more comfortable speaking on the internet, but never really thought to turn the camera on my face. But people were questioning it so much that, at some point, it clicked, and I was like, Maybe I just don’t ever show my face, and then it will keep people wondering more.
That was one of the things that was boosting my engagement, and I was like, Gladly. I’m about to give birth tomorrow. So I never, ever went into it with the thought of, I’m never going to show them my face and have it become this thing. It just accidentally happened.
What changed your mind?
I have a management company, and it was a constant discussion between us from a strategy angle, because it’s really hard to develop a brand without ever showing your face. But I had created a massive following and I had developed a pretty substantial brand through my personality. A lot of brands wanted to work with me early on when I was going super viral—even though you couldn’t see my face—but then that kind of wore off. I really had to think about, if I want this to be my long-term job, I’m going to need to be able to set up the camera and just talk to it.
I don’t think people realize I had so many things I wanted to talk about and so many ideas of things to film, but it was so incredibly difficult doing that without showing my face. When I wanted to deliver cakes to businesses in my area, I had to dress up as Santa, which was awful and I hated every second of it. I had gotten pretty creative with how to hide my face or how to film my videos, but I felt like there was an end to it.
@mothercookiecake I literally can’t believe I said this is you on a stripper pole TO HIS FACE #cookiecake #cakedelivery #firemen #santa #fyp ♬ Elf Theme (From “Elf”) – Just Kids
The face reveal was supposed to be on Christmas Day after my Christmas Cakemas saga, and I decided on Christmas Eve that I just didn’t want to do it. I was tired, I had just delivered 12 cakes dressed up as Santa Claus, and taking the beard off at that moment just didn’t feel right, because I felt like I had more creativity left with not showing my face. And I was really worried that people were going to unfollow me or not be interested anymore. For a long time, I thought the only thing that made me interesting was people didn’t know who I was. But at the end of the day, I need to do what makes me happy, and after Christmas I was really ready. The biggest deciding factor was that this is becoming such a thing and none of it has been tied to me, because it’s not my real name and it’s not my face, so I can’t take credit for any of these fabulous moments I’ve had on the internet.
So is Mother Cookie Cake here to stay?
Every day I’m like, Gosh, am I going to have to go back to corporate America? That would be awful. I am going to be on the internet for as long as the internet will have me, and I don’t really know what that looks like yet. I would love to do something like open up a storefront and have cookie cakes on demand. I would love to be able to ship cookie cakes. But I’m also really excited about the prospect of social media. The plan is to see how big I can make it and go from there.
Follow Mother Cookie Cake on Instagram and TikTok for a chance to enter her monthly cake raffles.
