My old colleague Taylor Dungjen has come up with a side gig that I think is just brilliant.

I worked with Taylor at the Toledo Blade, where I wrote about food and she wrote about crime. Several years ago, she switched careers and became a cop. The change in careers apparently seemed so unusual that NBC Nightly News filmed an entire segment about her.

A couple of months later, another female newsroom employee at the Blade also joined the police in a nearby department. There is a lesson to be learned there, but it is probably the folks at NBC who need to learn it.

Taylor, 37, is the single mother of a rambunctious 10-year-old boy. She is a sergeant with the Toledo Police Department, in charge of recruiting. She doesn’t absolutely need the extra money, which is good, because she does not make a lot of it. That isn’t why she has the second job.

Taylor’s side gig is baking.

“It is fun. I get to be creative and I get to interact with people in a different way, and meet new people,” she says.

Every weekend, she puts an impressive assortment of baked goods on some shelves outside her house. People take what they want and pay on an honor system. It may help that she is a police officer.

“I think the only person who has ever taken cookies without paying or asking or without previous permission is my son. When he asks permission, I’ll almost always say yes, but he prefers to take them and hide the wrappers around the house, but I always find them,” she says.

“He’s going to be a very bad criminal, I’m afraid. I say, ‘Either you need to become a really good criminal or become an honest person.’”

Taylor learned baking from her grandmother, who came to the U.S. from Germany. She has been baking her entire life, but only in spurts — when I knew her, I had no idea she baked.

“In the last 10 years, I started baking for my friends. It was something to do when I was bored, or had too much butter,” she says. I should probably mention here that she is very funny.

Last year, someone asked her to make some Mexican hot chocolate cookies, which she says are rich cookies with a chocolate base, a little cayenne pepper and marshmallows.

“They said, ‘I’ll pay you.’ I was like, OK, cool. Then I was like, I should make everyone pay for my cookies. I’m giving away cookies.”

In January, someone else encouraged her to sell her baked goods, and that is all it took. Her first day of business was Jan. 26. It reminds me of a high school bake sale, but one that is held every week.

She makes cake pops and similar items, but she mostly bakes cookies because that is what she likes to eat.

“I don’t like frosting, which I know people think is an abhorrent feature of mine. I don’t like cupcakes,” she says.

Making what she likes to eat can be problematic because then she wants to eat it, she says. And she always makes a lot, more than 100 individual baked goods each week.

“I do way too much. I’ve made this way harder on myself than it probably should be. But I don’t know any other way than to be stupid and give myself more work than I need,” she says.

Each week, she makes anywhere from four to 10 different varieties (“which is just me doing way too much. I have not found a comfortable middle yet”). Her most popular items are cosmic brownie cookies, which are similar to Little Debbie Cosmic Brownies, and oatmeal crème pies, which are similar to Little Debbie Oatmeal Crème Pies.

“I guess I’m just stealing ideas from the grocery store. But the homemade ones are better,” she says.

Actually, she does a lot of experimenting with her recipes — “which sometimes works out really well, but sometimes Toledo doesn’t like my weird things,” she says.

For instance, she saw a recipe for a sweet cornbread cookie, but she thought it might be too dry, so she filled them with strawberry jam. Because both corn and strawberries are abundant in Ohio in the summer, she called them Ohio Summer cookies. She was afraid they wouldn’t sell well, but people loved them, she says.

Her sugar cookies also draw fans, as do her s’mores cookies, which are exactly what you think they are. So do her cookies ‘n’ cream cookies, which have Oreos and cream cheese and white chocolate chips, plus half an Oreo stuck on top.

Naturally, she has had her failures, too. The first time she made birthday cake cookies, “I took it out of the oven and they were just so gross,” she says. And the people who bought her peanut butter miso cookies really liked them, but most people just thought they were weird.

“I like to try different things, and I can’t help it if Toledo doesn’t follow me. Toledo doesn’t understand my quirkiness, sometimes,” she says.

My favorite part of Taylor’s business is its name. She calls it Sad Snacks. She calls her customers “saddies.” Her motto is “Happy snacks for sad people.”

“I do think of myself as a sad person. Everybody has something to be sad about. Look at the world. It’s terrible. Everything is terrible,” she says.

“I tell people I’m an older emo. I grew up listening to sad girl music. I still listen to it. And I like to eat when I’m sad.”

The problem with the motto about happy snacks is that it makes people think they have marijuana in them, which was never her intention. While recreational weed is legal in Ohio, as a police officer she cannot indulge in it.

She makes cookies for special occasions, too. For a bachelorette party, she was commissioned to make penis-shaped cookies. Her 10-year-old son asked to see them, so she showed him the cookies which were baked, but still undecorated.

“I don’t see it,” he said.

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