By John Lehndorff
All Photos Courtesy of Retailers
Buttery frosted cookies are the perfect canvas for spelling out ‘I HEART You’
Sugar Bloom Cookies
Frankly, my dears, Valentine’s Day can become a royal pain in the brain for couples that have been together for a while. No, it doesn’t mean the fire has fizzled. It’s just that each person has already given the usual suspects—the heart-shaped cards, perfumes, framed images, truffles and couples’ massages.
This year, if you want to get your lover something new and one-of-a-kind, consider custom cookies. Trust us: These are not your ordinary frosted custom cookies but works of art.
For the season of love, AvidLifestyle talked with three local cookie companies, each offering different cookie shapes, sizes, flavors and decorations designed to send a personal message of love. It’s the Valentine’s Day gift you can also dip in your latte.
Where Cookie Creativity Blooms
Andrea Goossens has always thought outside the cookie box and has never used one of those commercial cookie cutters. “I started designing and building my own cookie cutter using a 3D printer, customized to a particular cookie idea,” she says. Goossens is the founder of Sugar Bloom Cookies and a former winner of the “Christmas Cookie Challenge” on the Food Network.
Each cookie order allows for the maximum amount of personalization. Sugar Boom offers flavors beyond the shop’s basic cookie dough made with more
expensive European butter and Nielsen-Massey’s Madagascar vanilla bean paste. “We can add chocolate chunks, freeze-dried strawberries and other flavors to the dough. It just adds another dimension to the decorations and makes it more creative than just one kind of cookie,” Goossens says. The flavor options extend to the icings.
“For Valentine’s Day, we’ll do a lot of red velvet cookies—in the actual dough or icing. We’ll never do the same thing on the top as we would on the bottom. I care so much that it tastes like a very good cookie and not just that it looks like one,” she says.
Goossens has come up with new designs for February’s big holiday. “We’ll have a marching band cutout drummer that says: “You make my heart beat!” Another one has a cowgirl and cowboy theme. There’s still plenty of room to personalize them with a name or initials,” she says.
When you order, Sugar Bloom offers five tiers of design and decoration. “Each tier adds more details. For tier five, there are no limits on the design or the colors you can use,” Goossens says. Perhaps Sugar Bloom’s ultimate offering is a giant cookie with a portrait hand-painted in color on the icing. “It is true to size—as big as your face—and very customizable,” she says.
Cookie Artist, Katy Curry
Cookies that Play Ball
“I love designing cookies for families and couples. It’s all about personalizing them with names, colors and words of love,” says Katy Curry, otherwise known as Cookie Lady Katy. She has built a reputation for baking perfectly designed cookies for businesses ranging from the Denver Broncos to The Broadmoor.
The Denver-based bakery crafts hand-cut shortbread cookies topped with vanilla royal icing and detailed decorations. Numerous cookie shapes are available starting, naturally, with a heart.
“For Valentine’s Day, we get a lot of orders for sports-related cookies for a person’s favorite sport—baseball, golf, football and tennis,” Curry says.
Yes, she offers pickleball-shaped cookies, too. “What makes these cookies special is always the thought behind them,” she says.
Picture Perfect Sweetness
Suga Me Sweet specializes in cookies that look like home, work or those that we love.
“Anything you can take a picture of, I can put on a cookie,” says Kristin Marin, owner of the 10-year-old Highlands Ranch bakery. She has crafted many February cookies featuring engagement photos in various shapes, colors and designs.
Marin has very particular ideas about the ideal cookie recipe. “I make a vanilla sugar cookie—no almond extract—and roll them out a little thicker. You get more crunch and chew in each one,” she says. Suga Me Sweet cookies are iced, and an image is printed on top using food dyes.
Suga Me Sweet
Sugar Bloom Cookies
Minimum order is one dozen. Order cookies online for shipping or pick
up at Sugar Bloom Cookies shop in Westminster.
Cookie Lady Katy
Cookies are shipped. Minimum order is two dozen.
Suga Me Sweet
Highlands Ranch pickup, delivery. Two dozen minimum order.