When Jennifer Palmer bakes cookies, she doesn't mess with tiny boxes of sugar and flour She goes straight for the 50-pound bags.      A typical batch also might include 20 eggs and 10 pounds of butter. Because when Palmer bakes, she usually makes about 500 cookies at a time.      The slender South Bay resident doesn't suffer from a gargantuan sweet tooth. Instead, she's the one-woman staff behind Isabella's Cookie Company She handles every aspect of the burgeoning business - the buying, baking, packaging, labeling, marketing and even delivery of her handcrafted cookie creations.      "I do everything within my power to ensure (the business) succeeds. That's what drives me the most," said Palmer, 27, who quit her job in real estate management last year to focus full-time on her cookie company.      "I'm working harder than ever, but I've never had so much fun in all my life," she said. "It's so gratifying."      Pleasing people with homemade goodies is nothing new for Palmer, who's been baking since elementary school.      "My parents both worked," she said. "I'd get bored after school, so I'd bake. My mom had all these down-home type cookbooks."      Palmer kept her kitchen skills in college, trading cookies and treats for tutoring. She continued baking after graduation, creating baskets of baked goods as gifts for friends and clients. .When her recipients started requesting baskets of their own to send to their friends and colleagues, Palmer figured she had a good home-based business on her hands.      "Our friends kept telling us, `People would pay money for these,' "said Phil Reuter, 35, Palmer's boyfriend of four years and No. 1 cookie-taster.      In fact, the couple's friends help finetune Palmer's recipes.      "She would do prototypes," said Janet Jardin of Gardena. "She'd give us different versions of her cookies and we'd critique each one of them."      Palmer's first creation - dubbed "The Original" - is a brown sugar cookie crammed with walnuts, chocolate and peanut butter chips. It's still her favorite.      After working a 40-hour week at her real estate job, Palmer spent every free moment baking and packaging her homemade cookies. She designed a company logo on her home computer and invested in a high-quality printer to create stickers, stationery and brochures. Palmer says she simply chose Isabella as a name because she likes it. The company is not named after anyone in her life. "She lives and breathes her work," Reuter said.      Palmer joined the Redondo Beach Chamber of Commerce to connect herself to the South Bay business world. She researched patenting her recipes and learned the requirements of the Food and Drug Administration. Then she left her full-time job, collected all her savings and poured them into Isabella's Cookie Company. "I was at a point where I could take that leap," she said.      That was almost a year ago and it has been cookie craziness ever since.      Isabella's Cookie Co. brings in $45,000 annually, Palmer said. Her weekly sales goal of $900 is up $200 from last year, and her regular client list has grown to 300, including five local retail outlets.      Each retailer was hand-picked by Palmer and Reuter, lifelong South Bay residents who asked their favorite neighborhood shops if they'd like to carry the cookies.      Andre Kaiser, owner of Granny's Grocery in Hermosa Beach, was skeptical when the pair first approached him.      "They gave me samples and I loved them, but when they told me the price, I said, `There's no way I can sell a cookie for $3,' " Maser said. "But I said I would put them on my counter. She gave me about nine cookies at 4 in the afternoon. By 4:30, I was calling her to bring in more. Now I have people who drive here just for the cookies."      Palmer expanded her recipe repertoire to include seven cookie varieties. There's The Peanut Butter Bomb, The Mocha Monster and The Apple Fritter and Rocky Road. Then there's The Sugar Rush and Chocolate Sugar Rush, which Palmer modifies each month for the holidays. For March, she'll dye the cookies and their frosting St. Patrick's Day green. She also makes fancy breads, muffins, biscotti and homemade granola.      With all those goodies, Palmer quickly outgrew the kitchen in her Redondo Beach home. Thanks to her real estate management connections, she found affordable commercial kitchen space in a veterans' facility near LAX. The only problem? The hours. Because the facility serves three meals a day, Palmer could use the kitchen from only 8 p.m. to 4 a.m.      So that's where she spends her time most nights, mixing, baking and wrapping her livelihood. Palmer estimates she's baked close to 100,000 cookies during the past two years. "Every cookie is handmade from start to finish," she said.      She makes about 50 batches on a typical night, depending on what's needed. She uses no preservatives and bakes everything to order. Reuter helps when he can, but Palmer's usually on her own.      "I need to get out of the kitchen, because it's not allowing me to expand into other areas and other markets," she said. "But I'm the only one who knows what the batter is supposed to look like to make the cookies come out the same every time."      To grow the company further, she has to hire some help. It's a scary step she's preparing to take. "It's threatening to get too big," Reuter said. "It's a beast sometimes, but we really believe in it."      The pair pulled all-nighters to fill this year's Valentine's Day orders and Palmer continues to bake four to six nights a week. Days are devoted to marketing, meetings and procuring supplies. She dreams of a day off and bringing her burn-covered hands in for a manicure, but there just isn't time.      "I haven't been able to back down and enjoy the benefits yet," she said. "But I keep going back to it. There's still a buzz about it. It still makes me happy."

By Sandy Cohen Daily Breeze