Waitress who lost job in pandemic turns hobby into £14,000 cookie business

news.com.au: “I was so bored. That’s when I started baking.” And, the side hobby meant getting fired was actually a stroke of luck as it gave her the space to try out some experimental dessert recipes that eventually turned into a business.Mona also managed to lose weight and created her loaded cookie recipes as her “cheat meal” guilty pleasure.The massive snacks are made up of baked cookie dough that surrounds a sweet filling such as Malteser spread or melted Kinder Bueno that oozes out when you bite the cookie.Other tasty chocolate and biscuit elements are folded into the dough for texture.Her family quickly fell in loved with her puds and her father suggested she sell the cookies – so she created Mona’s Treats with 15 unique cookie flavours available.The keen baker created an Instagram account and spent $500 (£282) on ingredients for her first industrial sized batch.Mona said: “When I started creating my flavours, at first I would sell around 30 or 40, it was quite little.”But, she went on to sell an average of 450 cookies a month and even wakes up at 2am to keep up with her orders.Mona delivers around Melbourne and ships across Australia using the express post.And, at the height of lockdown in her area Mona was selling 700 cookies a month even though it takes 10 hours to make 200 of the sweet snacks.The baker now has another front line job and works on Mona’s Treats on her days off.The Instagram-based side hustle has turned over a whopping £14,000 in revenue since she started up.And, the cook – who runs her business from her parent’s kitchen – claims she will run the business full time when she is taking 1,500 orders each month.She even plans to work with UberEats and wholesalers to scale up her business.Mona said:.