Every morning at 7:30 a.m., a stack of freshly baked cookies arrives at the Bishop’s snack bar. Warm, soft in the center, and sometimes sold out before the line disappears, these cookies have become a staple of the Bishop’s experience. 

Most students never stop to question who makes them. They simply unwrap the bag and take a bite. But behind every chocolate chip cookie, muffin, brownie, and slice of banana bread is Mrs. Quena Nieto-Marco, the baker whose devotion and near-midnight work schedule fuel one of Bishop’s most loved possessions. 

For Mrs. Nieto-Marco, this all began in a way she never expected. She started as a caring mom who volunteered at her kids’ school, often donating baked goods for events. But one afternoon in 2017, former Director of Admissions, Ms. Kim Cooper, approached her with a request: Would she be willing to bake 3,000 cookies for Bishop’s annual Open House? “It’s funny,” she recalled, “I never thought I was going to end up doing this.”

She agreed, and her life changed overnight. After the Open House, Sara Sweets, Former Director of Kitchen Services, approached her again. Their former bakery supplier had been inconsistent, and they asked if she could begin baking regularly for the school. She said yes and has been the school’s primary provider of baked goods since.

Though you would expect the cookies to be mass-produced or even made in a school kitchen, the truth is the opposite. Every cookie begins at her home. Several years ago, when her catering business began to grow, she and her family moved to a larger house, one with enough room to construct a full in-home bakery. “It felt like I got the best deal of both worlds,” she said. She could run her business and still work from home.

 Mrs. Queno Nieto-Marco became a chef in Mexico City around 30 years ago. She also studied at Le Cordon Bleu Paris, in France, 15 years ago, where she took a specialty course,  and Pâtisserie du Terroir, which lasted around three months. What she loved most was the craft of French pastries, specifically the dough, precision, and hours that went into making them. “I’ve always had an insane love for France,” she explained. 

After that experience, she fell in love with anything French: danishes, brioches, croissants, and any kind of yeasted doughs and breads that require technique and patience. For her, “Knowing that with a bit of water, flour, and yeast will become the most beautiful thing in the world is an absolutely fascinating concept [she] can’t wrap [her] head around.”

While supplying Bishop’s, Mrs. Nieto-Marco also spent eight years as the pastry chef at Brick & Bell, a student favorite, where she developed recipes and trained the baking team. Last year, she stepped away from Brick & Bell. “It was just crazy to keep working seven days a week,” she explained, “five days on snack bar duty and two at the Cafe bakery.” 

Leaving was bittersweet for both her and her co-workers, but as she put it, “At the same time, I left a super strong team, and I thought they could keep working well without me there.”

After around 10 months, she took a position at UC San Diego (UCSD) Hospitality within UCSD Housing, Dining, and Hospitality (HDH). UCSD HDH prepares food from scratch daily for the 30,000+ campus community ​​through its extensive network of dining options. “The learning experience has been amazing,” she expressed. Despite the workload, she embraces every role with enthusiasm, saying, “If not, I get super bored.”

But what makes her Bishop’s cookies so good? It starts with her ingredients. She uses Belgian 60-70% bittersweet chocolate, organic white whole-wheat flour, and even her own homemade vanilla extract. Once a week, she shops for supplies of butter, eggs, fruit, and cream. Every other day, she prepares large batches of dough, which must rest and freeze for at least 48 hours so the flour fully hydrates, and she also does all her measuring and preparation work. 

And every night around 11:00 p.m., she starts baking. Her process may be time-consuming and demanding, but every minute is worth it for the flavor it creates. “I send them in the morning to ensure they taste fresh and conserve their deliciousness,” she explains.

Every week, she bakes around 800 cookies and 400 of the other baked goods. For the cookies, she uses a method called shock baking, which is setting the oven to 450°F and baking the cookies for exactly 11 minutes, giving the cookies a crisp, golden crust while keeping the centers soft. She measures each cookie to exactly 115 grams of dough to ensure they bake evenly. Even with a commercial double oven, the cookies alone take two and a half hours. The brownies, muffins, and banana breads come after. Most nights, she finishes around 3:00 a.m.

Her baked goods arrive at Bishop’s every morning, delivered by her daughters, who attend La Jolla Country Day but drop off the boxes on their way to school. Years ago, her son Sebastian Garma-Nieto (’23) made the deliveries before his 8 a.m. classes.

Ms. Criselle Williams, who works in the Food Department and Kitchen and makes the much-loved breakfast burritos, has worked at the Bishop’s snack bar for a decade, and sees the excitement Mrs. Nieto-Marco’s baked goods, specifically the chocolate chip cookies, bring every single day. She watches students walk up, unwrap their cookies, and devour them, sometimes digging through the tray for the “best” one. “At first I told them, ‘They’re all the same,’” Ms. Williams said, laughing. “But they told me, ‘No, it’s not.’ They want the gooey ones.”

Students, it turns out, have developed a surprisingly advanced cookie-selection instinct. And they’re not wrong. Mrs. Nieto-Marco has noticed the same thing. “The cookies in the middle of the tray are way softer,” she said, impressed that the students spotted the difference.

Zara Zierhut (‘27) is one of those students. “I love both of the cookies — chocolate chip and snickerdoodle. I feel they are the perfect size [so] that they just tide me over until lunch, and I love having a sweet treat in the middle of the day.” Having them just makes her feel a bit more optimistic throughout the day. 

Bishop’s has also shaped Mrs. Nieto-Marco’s recipes in unexpected ways. When the school asked for healthier alternatives that would lower sugar and increase fiber content, she re-engineered everything, switching to whole-wheat flour, cutting down on sugar, and adjusting muffins to use more egg whites. “I wrote all the recipes specially for Bishop’s,” she said. Still, she laughs at the idea of cookies as a healthy food, “If you want to eat healthy, you need to eat food, not cookies or brownies.”

Geordie Ahn (‘28) appreciates the balance. “My favorite baked goods from the snack bar line are the cookies and chocolate muffins. I enjoy both of them because they are sugary enough to be a nice treat in the day without just tasting like pure sugar.” He explained that they improve his mood in general since he treats them as a personal reward for himself on days when he has tests. “They are a fun little reward to eat every once in a while,” he said. 

And for some students, her baked goods are essential. Brad LaDrido (‘26) shared, “I often leave my house not eating breakfast, and the snack bar line and baked goods are the single thing that gets me through the day. The baked goods, specifically the blueberry muffins and banana bread, are a superhero to me.” What makes them special to him is that they don’t taste very processed, but instead, you can tell they’re homemade.

Brad’s sentiment is exactly what Mrs. Nieto-Marco hopes students feel. As she put it, “I think the home-made feeling and care that goes into every cookie makes them taste so much better. The fact that they are fresh every morning and baked with the best quality ingredients doesn’t hurt, either.”

Though she doesn’t walk around campus daily, Mrs. Nieto-Marco’s impact is everywhere. Her cookies have become part of what makes Bishop’s feel like Bishop’s. Zara reflected, “Bishops has had these baked goods for so long, I feel like they are an important part of our school to me.”

Most students never meet her. They don’t see the late-night dough, or the commercial oven glowing at 2 a.m., or the freezer filled with trays resting for 48 hours. But every cookie carries her hard work and love. Unseen, Mrs. Quena Nieto-Marco has become one of the most influential people on campus and the creator of a tradition that students taste every morning.

Maggie Hu (‘28), a former staff writer of  The Tower, contributed to reporting.