A Fitness Coach Turns to Baking
“I don’t want to make just healthy cookies. They have to taste good first,” said Anke Cosich of the various goods that she bakes under
 Durell Godfrey
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the name Anke’s Fit Bakery, which was an outgrowth of New Image Fitness, the personal training company she owns with her husband, Chris Cosich.
“I am a fitness trainer and got to food that way,” she said. “My husband is gluten intolerant and I got interested in varying what I could recommend that people eat.” Some of the recipes she uses are variations of ones she remembers from her family in Germany. “The cookies are not terribly sweet. By using less sugar you can actually taste the nuts and oats,” she said.
Ms. Cosich tailors her output to each season and what is available. This past summer, for instance, she made jam using local strawberries and agave nectar to add sweetness. This winter she will add brownies to the list. She never uses wheat or refined sugars, only organic maple syrup, agave, and sucanat, an unrefined, raw cane sugar. She also uses oats, oat flour, and oat bran, as well as spelt, a grain thought to be healthier than wheat. She eschews butter in favor of canola and other wholesome oils as well as seeds and nuts.
Her mother and grandmother cooked and baked at home, and after she finished school, Ms. Cosich was trained in the hotel business near Frankfurt. She was the youngest five-star hotel manager in Germany, working there for two years before coming to New York in 1995.
She continued to work in the industry in New York, Germany, and Buenos Aires until becoming certified as a trainer in New York in 2004, not long before meeting her husband. She has been on the South Fork since 2003, first in Southampton and now in Amagansett.
“They’re not miracle cookies,” Ms. Cosich emphasized. “I’m not a calorie counter, but I want something that you can eat without going into a sugar coma.”
Although she still trains a few clients, her baking is taking precedence. “You need to eat right to be active,” she said, adding that her customers are aware of what they can and can’t tolerate.
She doesn’t make any health claims for her products, but does list all the ingredients on the packages in type that is big enough to read. A sheet describing what are thought to be the benefits of some of the ingredients she uses is available at ankesfitbakery@yahoo.com.
“Kristi Hood started me off at the Springs General Store in 2006,” Ms. Cosich said. Now, Juicy Naam, Vicki’s Veggies, and East Hampton Gourmet also sell her products. The T Salon at the Chelsea Market in Manhattan has just started carrying them as well. And of course there are summer customers to whom she ships granola and cookies all over the country during the winter.
In addition to chocolate oat crunch, oat almond cranberry crunch, “oat’er ginger snap cookies,” and peanut butter bars, Ms. Cosich makes two kinds of granola — cranberry almond and chocolate banana — and low-fat oat bran spelt brownies, rosemary and black olives spelt flat bread, oat bran muffins, and crumb pies.
She bakes three days a week, using a commercial oven. “I experiment a lot,” she said. On Sundays she tries her recipes out on her friends, whose input can influence the final ingredients. Ms. Cosich does all the work herself, even making deliveries to New York. And, with a Web site in the works, she is also eager to find more stores to carry her goods.