INTRODUCTION
There’s More Than One Way to Spin a Cookie Cutter
Here are the first four lines of a poem I wrote in second grade:
SOME COOKIES ARE ROUND,
SOME COOKIES ARE SQUARE,
SOME COOKIES HAVE ICING,
SOME COOKIES ARE BARE.
BEGINNINGS
It’s a pretty good description of the adventure we are about to go on. But first, a little background.
Ever since I can remember, I have made things. Whether it was a house for worms or a game to play, I was always creating something new, crafty, or quirky. As a grade schooler, I was never satisfied eating commercially prepared food. I had to make something: a batch of rice, or a pot of tomato sauce, or potato chips from scratch.
Except when it came to cookies. I was invariably drawn to the colorful boxes and bags—Oreos, Mallomars, Fig Newtons, Lorna Doones, and Chips Ahoy!—that filled our cupboards. It was my grandmother’s cookies, however, that made the deepest impression on me. Whenever she visited us on Long Island, she always showed up with “Nana Cookies,” the name my family affectionately called the treats she baked in her Brooklyn kitchen. Using cream cheese dough and a cookie gun, she made dozens of shapes that, to an eight-year-old, were nothing short of magic. The various circles she attached to the end of the gun formed the cookies, much like my cookie cutters define the shapes of my cookies today. When I popped one of Nana’s cookies into my mouth, I was always thinking about that shape and noticing the simple embellishments—a maraschino cherry, a chocolate chip, an almond sliver. My grandmother eventually moved to Florida, gave up her cookie making, and left her pans and cookie gun to me.
Curiously, my mother never stepped foot in the kitchen; her favorite cookbook was The I Hate to Cook Book by Peg Bracken. But she did cultivate in me an intense love of games. After dinner, we always sat around the table to play card and board games. Bridge, Scrabble, gin rummy, Rack-O, and Sorry were among my favorites. I’m sure that’s why games—not just playing them but appreciating their graphic designs—are such an important part of my life.
So my grandmother was all cookies and my mother was all games. I was lucky enough to inherit both passions.
Although it seemed from the start that I was going to be an artist or maker of some sort, I began college as an English major. Among my first electives was a class based on the work of Josef Albers, the father of modern color studies. The class assignments challenged me to play games with color relationships that would change the viewers’ perception of them. I was hooked. I loved working with shape, color, and design. This was the beginning of my obsession with transformation.
As a working artist, I made paintings in bold relief with major dimensionality. I layered paint thickly onto canvas, eliciting comments that my paint resembled frosting. As I pursued my dream of being a fine artist in New York City, I not only made paintings in my SoHo studio but put Nana’s pans and cookie gun to good use and made cookie gifts for friends. At parties, guests couldn’t get enough of them.
Emboldened by these raves, I took my cookies to two nearby specialty food stores, both of which kept renewing their orders. Then I aimed even higher and made Dean & DeLuca my next client. I’ll never forget walking into the original SoHo store, full of confidence and certain my cookies would sell. Soon, I was fielding requests for other varieties, and that’s when I expanded to making classic chocolate chip and peanut butter cookies. Bloomingdale’s called not long after, and in 1979 Patti Paige Baked Ideas was born.
Eventually, I needed to create something else entirely, beyond the cream cheese, chocolate chip, and peanut butter doughs, so I began to bake gingerbread and construct gingerbread houses. I’ve probably made every iconic building in New York City, along with dozens of private homes. Many of these made it into the New York Times, the New York Daily News, and numerous magazines.
When I was asked to bake a cake for an art opening, my two worlds suddenly collided. One commission led to several others, but it was the one for Acorn Press that moved me to think more inventively about cookie shapes. Unable to find the right acorn cookie cutter, I made one myself, which opened up endless possibilities. Making my own cutters distinguished me from every other baker; I made unique frames for unique cookies. Crazy custom cookie orders began to roll in—the iconic soldier that stands outside the Cartier store, the face of Dennis Rodman, the box of Tide for a brand anniversary. My clients have included Hillary Clinton (who ordered NYC taxi cab cookies for one of her luncheons) and her husband, whose administration commissioned a batch of my Easter cookies for the annual White House Easter Egg Roll. Disney, Alicia Keys, David Hyde Pierce, Ina Garten (the Barefoot Contessa), and Martha Stewart have all ordered Baked Ideas confections.
People think it is magical to create an original cookie, especially when the shape is meant to become something else. You can never tell how many different shapes might come from a cutter shaped like the state of Texas or a baseball cap. I have discovered that great things can take shape within rigid confines, especially when you really use your imagination. You can take something nostalgic and make it modern, something disguised and make it familiar. By playing games with shapes, a little dough and colored icing can be transformed into dozens of different designs.
You Can’t Judge a Cookie by Its Cutter is a cookie decorating game that anybody can play. In it, I have taken 25 cookie cutters and created four different, beautiful cookies from each one. I challenge you to see even more in the shapes that follow. It’s a fun way of looking at a cookie cutter not just for what it is, but for what it could be. Indeed, I like to call them “cookies” cutters for their ability to produce multiple images.
WHY NOT JUDGE A COOKIE BY ITS CUTTER?
The inspiration for this book came—as most things that interest me do—rather serendipitously. My custom cookie cutters hang on a wall that spans the length of my studio. Whenever guests visit me there, they are immediately drawn to the wall and naturally begin guessing what each shape is supposed to be. “Is that a frog?” or “Does that make a car shape?” One day I suddenly realized that all of their guesses could be right. And as a lover of wordplay, I couldn’t help but repeat to myself, “You can’t judge a cookie by its cutter.”
Being my mother’s child, I began to play the game myself. And then it became an obsession. In a football helmet cutter, I saw a colorful bowl of fruit and an elephant head. In a wedding cake cutter, I found a stack of suitcases, a typewriter on a desk, and a pair of witch’s shoes. I saw a cone of cotton candy, a paintbrush, and a ship in a bottle in a guitar cookie cutter.
As I was drawn deeper and deeper into coming up with transformations, I used a technique to help me “see.” Trace the cutter on a piece of paper and draw inside the lines, ignoring what the cutter represents and sketching instead what you see. Try to keep it simple, with only the necessary lines involved so that the image comes to life. If it doesn’t come to you in the moment, its next incarnation might just pop out at you when you least expect it. Make it a competition for the whole family to discover how many new cookie designs can come from just one cutter. Then bake the shape and fiddle around with the icing.
Involving friends and family was by far the best part of making this book. I enlisted the help of my assistants, my daughter, and plenty of friends. It was fascinating to see what people came up with, how everyone saw something so different in one cutter shape. Seeing through their eyes became great fun for me and provided a lot of inspiration for my own designs. Just when I thought there was nothing left to find within a shape, my eyes would shift and an image would appear. I never settle for a partial transformation; the cutter has to yield a well-formed and easy-to-translate cookie. It can be challenging, but that’s the fun of it!
Admittedly, decorating cookies requires patience and perseverance. The key is to have fun and enjoy the process. Making both the dough and icing is easy; it’s the decorating that takes practice. Be sure to read all of the chapters on techniques (starting here) before you begin and then refer to them often as you create the cookies. The techniques are there to guide you, as are the cookie designs, but your cookies should look like you made them; they needn’t look like mine, and whoever is lucky enough to receive them will always be impressed. (In truth, some of my best ideas and cookies have come from mistakes.) The keys to creating beautiful cookies are:
• Exercise restraint. Less is more. Don’t feel overwhelmed.
• Step back. Give the designs you make a minute to rest before you edit.
• Let the cookies be what they are. Cookies are individuals. You can bake a dozen or two and try out all of the options swimming around in your head. It’s not a whole cake; cookie mistakes can easily be tossed into the garbage (or eaten!) and forgotten as a better idea surfaces.
Armed with a good attitude and the knowledge that, like a board game, there’s always another chance to win, making amazing cookies will become second nature. Play to win, but remember that in the end it’s just a game… and no matter how they look, your cookies will always taste great.