Chocolate whoopie pies are cooling on the counter, while the smell of molasses spice cookies wafts from the oven. Scoops of red velvet dough wait on baking sheets near containers of vanilla, mint and raspberry buttercream filling.

Orchestrating this kaleidoscope of colors and scents is Marisa Birky Angebranndt, spending sleepless nights mixing, baking and packing whoopie pies in her St. Nicholas Avenue apartment.

Angebranndt expected this holiday season to be the busiest yet for her young business, launched last year after she got laid off from a finance company. But an endorsement in this month’s “Real Simple” magazine is turning busy into crazy. There it is, on page 59 of the December issue: a full-page photo of her whoopie pies leading the “50 Gifts Under $50″ section as a “universal crowd pleaser.”

Angebranndt has received more than 50 orders since magazine-inspired calls started coming in about a week ago – as many orders as she usually gets in a month. She knew she’d be in the magazine, but didn’t know it had started reaching its more than 8 million readers until she got a call asking about the featured tins of whoopie pies.

Then her phone rang again. And again. “It’s been great,” Angebranndt said, “but it’s been insane.”

Last week she ran between the kitchen and the office, preparing boxes and tins between trips to the oven whenever the timer beeped. She rinsed baking sheets and washed bowls by hand while chatting with potential customers in Florida and California.

“WannaHavaCookie, this is Marisa,” she said calmly, phone cradled against her shoulder and hands working without pause. “Can I help you?”

Before WannaHavaCookie, Angebranndt never saw herself as the entrepreneurial type. She was happy working as an office manager in the finance industry, getting handed a daily to-do list and keeping executives’ offices running smoothly. But when her company got hit hard by the bursting housing bubble that heralded the recession, she found herself without a job.

What she did have was a love of baking and a decent severance package. She’d been baking cookies for friends and colleagues since college, developing a holiday tradition and a loyal following. “It was kind of a stress-reliever for me, because my job was so crazy,” she said.

Friends always said she should sell her treats, and when she learned in October 2007 that her office would be closing in five months, launching her own enterprise became more appealing. Her husband, Mark, a project manager for Bank of America, encouraged her to go for it. “Why don’t we try it?” he told her.

Mark convinced his wife to at least do a “focus group”: They passed out the usual holiday packages to friends and coworkers early that year, and included a variety of cookies and order forms to pass on to other friends. The experiment brought in about $800 in orders – not a lot, Angebranndt said, but enough to convince her that the business could work.

WannaHavaCookie offers a variety of cookies, but the whoopie pies get the most attention. Unlike the sticky marshmallow-filled version traditional in the Northeast, Angebranndt’s whoopie pies are based on a Midwestern family recipe and filled with buttercream – like a personal layer cake, she says, or an inside-out cupcake.

The attention from “Real Simple” started at a June trade show set up for editors seeking holiday gift guide ideas. Representatives from “Real Simple” barely stopped at her table, but Angebranndt sent a follow-up package and got an email a few months later requesting more samples. The magazine’s questionnaire asked whether the business could handle 1,000 orders. At that point, Angebranndt’s young company had received about 1,000 orders in its entire history. She went ahead and answered yes.

The joy of seeing her whoopie pies in the magazine alternates with the reality of working around the clock required to fill the orders. Angebranndt doesn’t expect a day off until Christmas, but she knows this will help her reach her business goals, like hiring an employee.

“That’s going to be a lot of work – in a good way,” she said, back to scooping buttercream after another promising phone call. “But still a lot of work.”