For the love of cookies
To make a baklava rosette cookie, you need filo dough, butter, and precise manual dexterity. Oh, and lots of patience.
Darcy Riggs-Suslovic was at her demonstration table at the Wedding Cookie Table Community’s Cookie University at Southpointe last Sunday. Crowds of women gathered round as she went through the steps, from cutting circles of dough, to overlapping them in a row, to brushing with butter, to adding the nutty filling, to rolling it all up and then cutting it into rosettes.
What resulted were just four or five dainty, flaky rosebuds the size of a strawberry, the kind of thing I would pop into my mouth all at once, chewing through 15 minutes of work and knowing it was worth it.
I am the kind of baker who is not above taking a batch of slice-and-bake cheater cookies to a family event. The most extravagant thing I’ve ever baked was a cake for my mom’s 60th birthday. I’d watched Martha Stewart decorate a cake with orchids.
“They’re edible,” Martha said. I searched floral shops for dendrobium orchids, then dipped them in egg whites and sugar, let them dry and then festooned the top of the cake. The cake was pretty, but I don’t think anybody ate the flowers. And I never tried that again.
Nobody would have invited me to bake for Cookie University; I was there with a film crew to capture the event for a story I’ll be producing for WQED. I came away from the event with a newfound respect for cookies, for those who love them and those who bake them.
The highlight of the event was the long cookie table bedecked with goodies. Some 160 bakers signed up to bake 12 dozen cookies each. That’s 23,000 cookies. A team of volunteers worked the whole time, replenishing the table as the hundreds of attendees passed through to choose their dozen each.
As we wandered through the crowd with our cameras, we met people who’d flown in from Rhode Island and Arizona and Florida – most of them having learned about the event from the group’s Facebook page. Some had never been to Pittsburgh, and this was the thing that finally brought them here. A few came in search of the Kaufmann’s cookie, the thumbprint cookie served back in the day at the department store. Others were looking for the fabled peach cookie. Kimberly C. Davis, from Forest Hills, was up all night baking her lemon pound cake cookies with 7-Up in them. Many of those attending have side gigs baking for weddings and funerals; for them the event was professional development.
Every time I work alongside a camera crew, I become a bit of an expert; I try to wrap my mind around the topic and its people, reach into its corners and bring the essence of it onto the screen. While interviewing one of the organizers, I stupidly referred to “the humble chocolate chip cookie.” I was gently told that there’s nothing humble about a good chocolate chip cookie, several varieties of which were on the table.
The Cookie University is perhaps its largest event, but the group is a true community; its 363,000 members share recipes and bake for charity. Laura Magone, the Monongahela native who is the community’s founder, has always said that cookies are love. That’s as good a reason as any to bake 12 dozen and bring them to Pittsburgh.
Alas, there were no peach cookies on the table this year, but there was a lemon cookie. It looked just like the fruit – was soft and creamy, the perfect bite of sweet and tart. I can only imagine the amount of work it took to make that bite. But so worth it.