Candace Hulbert still wakes up at 3 a.m.

It’s been over a month since she sold her business of 28 years, Candace’s Cookies, but her body is still on a baker’s clock, ready to head out, open up the commercial kitchen on the corner of Kearney and 19th Streets, and begin baking cookies for the town and the Olympic Peninsula.

“This is the eighth day I haven’t had a job,” she said in an interview at her home on July 18. “It’s weird.”

Since launching her cookie business in 1991, she estimates she has sold millions of cookies. Her regular clients have included the Rose Theatre, the Food Co-op, Sunrise Coffee, and Aldrich’s Market. And those are just the ones in Port Townsend. She’s also delivered cookies to the Nordland General Store, the Longhouse Market and Deli in Blyn, Nash’s Farm Store in Sequim, and Bella Rosa coffee and Country Air organic food store in Port Angeles.

She said some of her customers were disappointed with her decision to retire, but that all are happy for her.

Candace’s Cookies were the first baked goods that Bill Curtsinger, co-owner of Sunrise Coffee, added to the coffee selections they offered when they moved into their current building in the Port Townsend Boat Haven.

“We love her product, and she’s an icon baker in the town for what she does,” Curtsinger said. “You gotta have Candace’s stuff because she’s so well known in town.”

She also provided Sunrise with their first gluten-free products, which Curtsinger said were hugely popular among his customers.

“We’re sorry to see her go, and we hope she comes back,” he said.

Hulbert baked everything from classics like snickerdoodles and chocolate chip cookies to more unique creations like her pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, apple morning glory muffins, and black bean brownies. Her top-seller of all time was her oatmeal flax cookie, the success of which surprised her, since she thought they might be too “hippie dippy” for most people.

She’s perfected her recipes through “hideous amounts of practice,” in which she and her employees run multiple tests on numerous batches of a cookie to determine factors such as how long they can sit on counters. She prides herself on the organic and low-gluten ingredients she used for all of her products.

Candace moved to Port Townsend from Atlanta in 1977 with her late husband, Ray. She still has a Southern drawl, and calls friends “honey.” In an interview about her life and career, nothing got her more animated than the subject of biscuits, which she calls her “favorite thing.” To this day, she orders her flour and grits from the South for her personal baking.

Her first memory of Port Townsend was driving down the “S” curve of Sims Way and seeing all the trees before her.

“It was a dream come true, an absolutely perfect paradise,” she said. However, she was from the big city, and saw the small town move as a short chapter in her life.

“I was just visiting,” she said. “I brought all my stuff, but I did not ever think that I was gonna stay here by any means,” she said. “This is the first small town I ever lived in.”

Her first job was cutting produce at Reed’s, a grocery store that sat where QFC is now. She worked for the Community Action Council and the food stamp program. After a few years of that, she and Ray began planning to open a laundromat. But Ray came up with a better idea. There were no sports bars in town, and no bars uptown. In Port Townsend’s history as a port town, bars were a thing for downtown, not the family-friendly neighborhoods of uptown. And so they opened the Uptown Pub and Grill on Lawrence Street, which is still there today.

“We were scared to death,” she said. “We were really stupid and young, we had never poured a beer in our lives.” The pub took off, however, and Hulbert said she and Ray enjoyed all the aspects of owning a small business, such as sponsoring the local baseball teams.

While running the pub, Hulbert launched her catering company, Uptown Custom Catering, a business that she ran until 2015. During this time, she catered hundreds of weddings, baby showers, and other events, for which she cooked and baked everything but the wedding cake.

“They’re too hard, too stressful,” she said.

In 1991, she realized that wedding season takes up roughly two months of the year, and that she needed something to help fill that gap. That’s when she realized nobody was selling cookies in town. And so she began making chocolate peanut butter cookies, her favorite to this day, in the space next to the pub, where 1012 Coffee now sits. Her first order was the Food Co-op, which purchased 18 peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. She remembers calling Ray ecstatically.

She and Ray sold the pub in 1996. She continued on with her two businesses, while Ray retired “for a minute” before taking over many of the management duties from her to allow her to bake. She never stopped loving her work, and said Ray played a huge role by allowing her to follow all of her dreams, supporting all of her ventures.

In 2000, Hulbert opened Provisions with Hope Borsato, in the storefront part of her kitchen’s building, called the “Pumpkin” building by many due to the bright orange paint job it had until recently. She described Provisions as a “pantry/deli with sweets”. It was during this era that she would pull frequent 12-16 hour days between the three businesses, with up to 10 employees at one time in her kitchen. She estimates she’s employed hundreds of local people since 1982.

“I learned so much from all of them,” she said of her employees.

Over the years, numerous businesses used her kitchen to launch their business, such as Barbarian Fine Cuisine and the former Bub’s Tacos.

Hulbert may be described as kind and humble, but that doesn’t mean she is shy about acknowledging her success.

“Everything I touched, worked. And I’ve been self-employed all my life. I never got a paycheck from anyone.”

Hulbert is officially retired, but she’s not sure how long that will last.

“I’m kinda scared. I’m not ready to go out in the world yet. I don’t go out drinking or anything. I gotta find something else to do. I’m a foot-tapper. I really want to find a purpose with what I want to do.”

In the meantime, she is planning a trip to the British Isles in the fall, and is baking cookies for friends. Her urge to bake stays with her, and she is considering looking for a local kitchen to continue her business on a smaller scale.

“It’s been a wild ride.” she said. “And besides, probably half the town will lose weight, so that’s not a bad thing.”