oohbae.kitchen
The Setup
My kids started a cookie bakery. Miles is 12. Zelda is 9. They bake ube crinkle cookies — real ube, real butter, ridiculously purple — and people in Milwaukee actually want to buy them.
The problem wasn’t the cookies. The problem was everything around the cookies. Orders came in through Instagram DMs, text messages, and word of mouth. There was no menu, no pricing page, no way to pay online. Every order was a back-and-forth conversation. “How much for a dozen?” “Can I pick up Saturday?” “Do you take Venmo?”
I needed a real site. Not a Linktree. Not a Google Form. A site that looked like a business, took payments, and didn’t make me learn Shopify.
The Build
I sat down with Claude Code on a Friday night and described what I wanted in plain English. No wireframes. No Figma mockups. Just: “I need an e-commerce site for my kids’ ube cookie bakery. Here’s what they sell, here’s how ordering works, here’s the vibe.”
The stack is dead simple. Plain HTML and CSS. No framework. Stripe handles payments — customers pick their pack size, add to cart, and check out through Stripe’s hosted checkout. The site lives on Vercel (also accessible at ubemke.com). I wrote zero lines of code. I described pages, reviewed what Claude built, said “that’s not right” or “more like this,” and kept going.
The approach was conversational. I’d say things like “the headline should feel bold and fun, not corporate” or “make the order page show pack sizes with quantity pickers.” Claude would build it. I’d look at it. We’d iterate. It felt like directing a very fast, very literal contractor who never got tired.
The Mess
The first version was boring. Clean, sure. Functional, yes. But it looked like every other template-based food site on the internet. Nothing about it said “two kids in Milwaukee making purple cookies in their kitchen.” It was too safe.
So I scrapped it and started describing the energy I actually wanted. Big, chunky purple typography. A scrolling ticker bar at the bottom that says “Fresh Every Week • Filipino Flavor • Homemade • Real Ube • Kid-Run.” A photo of a hand holding one of those gorgeous purple crinkle cookies. A “Best Seller” badge in gold. The kind of site that makes you smile before you even read the copy.
The scope crept too. What started as a one-page “here’s what we sell, here’s how to order” turned into a multi-page site. An Our Story page. An About Ube page (because half our customers don’t know what ube is). A contact page. An events page. Each addition meant more prompting, more reviewing, more “actually, can we change this.” But because Claude builds fast, the scope creep didn’t cost me weeks. It cost me hours.
The Result
The site is live and processing real orders through Stripe. Customers pick their pack — 6, 12, 18, or 24 cookies — add to cart, and pay. We do Saturday and Sunday pickup in Shorewood and Bay View, plus Friday delivery for a $3 fee. The whole flow works end-to-end without anyone needing to DM us.
What shipped is genuinely better than what most small bakeries have. The photography is real (our cookies, our kids’ hands). The brand voice is fun without trying too hard. The ordering experience is clean. And the whole thing was built in a weekend by someone who doesn’t write code for a living.
Miles and Zelda now have a real business with a real website. They can send someone a link instead of typing out the menu in a DM. That’s the difference between a side hustle and a business — even a tiny one run by kids.
The Takeaway
You don’t need to be a developer to ship a real e-commerce site. You need to know what you want, be willing to say “that’s not right” fifty times, and have a tool that can keep up with your taste.
How It’s Built
- Frontend: Plain HTML + CSS (no framework)
- Payments: Stripe checkout
- Hosting: Vercel (ubemke.com redirects to oohbae.kitchen)
- Cost to run: Essentially free (Vercel free tier + Stripe transaction fees)
- Built with: Claude Code — every line of code generated from plain English prompts