A tasty tribute
Cookie university celebrates 250 years of sweet treats
Move over, apple pie.
America is baseball, hot dogs, and … cookies.
Cookie Table University, a celebration of cookies hosted by the Wedding Cookie Table Community, held its 11th annual event on Sunday at Hilton Garden Inn at Southpointe, featuring 250 cookie recipes spanning the history of the sweet treat in honor of America’s 250th anniversary.
“This is great. The cookies are gorgeous, and there are so many more people here than I thought. I’m getting so many ideas. It’s a lot of fun,” said Tori Maatta of Pittsburgh, who is getting married on Oct. 2 and attended the event with her mother, Christin Maatta, and a family friend, Catherine Carroll, who marked her 80th birthday. “We wanted to celebrate with the birthday girl, and I’m getting a lot of inspo. I am absolutely having a cookie table, and I’m getting a lot of ideas here.”
The cookies – thousands of them – were arranged on two 40-foot cookie tables, and attendees selected a dozen cookies to take home.
That, it turns out, was the hard part.
“I was overwhelmed. There were so many kinds of cookies that I went through the line and thought, ‘How do we pick what kinds we want to take?'” said Kim White, who drove from Columbus, Ohio, with her husband, Mike, to visit. “I thought it was so interesting how the cookies date back as far as the start of the country. It was an amazing event.”
About 180 bakers who volunteered for the event were assigned cookies that spanned U.S. history. The goal, said Laura Magone, founder of the Wedding Cookie Table Community, was to tell the country’s history, using cookies that represented important historical figures or events dating to 1776.
The variety of cookies was remarkable: the original 1913 recipe for Girl Scout cookies; an original Toll House cookie; a cookie made with Tang; and cookies enjoyed and/or baked by presidents and their spouses including the Eisenhowers, Laura Bush (cowboy cookies), and Barack Obama (crunchy cookies).
AnnMarie O’Rourke of Grove City, a member of the Wedding Cookie Table Community, baked three varieties of cookies, including Betty Ford’s chocolate cookie and a Pope Leo XIV lofthouse-style cookie.
“I loved the idea of making cookies that were made over the course of American history,” said O’Rourke. “Some of the cookies were definitely a challenge because some of the ingredients bakers used to use aren’t available, so you have to adapt the recipes, and for some of the recipes you have to adjust measurements.”
For her part, Magone made a “poor man’s cookie” from the Great Depression era, which she adapted, using whole milk Greek yogurt instead of shortening.
Other cookies: 1937 Hindenburg Kirsch cookies, Paul Revere mini-rum bar cakes, Mister Rogers rainbow cookies, Andy Warhol tomato soup sugar cookies, Susan B. Anthony peach cobbler cookies, women’s suffrage pfeffernusse cookies, World War I bacon fat soft molasses cookies, and Marlon Brando homemade mallobars.
More than 1,500 people attended the two sessions, with attendees lining up an hour before the first session started at 9 a.m.
Bakers and cookie lovers – many bedecked in red, white and blue – came from as far as Seattle, California, Michigan, and Iowa to pick out cookies, participate in Cookie Table University, which included vendors and activities, including cookie decorating classes.
Cyndi Eicholtz and Linda Kempski made the trek from Baltimore, Md., and brought along their husbands, Bob and Mike, who ended up having as much fun as their wives.
Eicholtz stumbled across the Wedding Cookie Table Community website – the group now has 406,000 members across the country and internationally – while she was researching wedding cookie tables, which she hadn’t heard of until a friend attended a wedding that included a large cookie spread.
She attended her first Cookie Table University last year and was excited to return for the America 250 event.
“It’s just amazing what these ladies and gentlemen put together. I’m fascinated with wedding cookie tables, and this is a lot of fun,” said Eicholtz. “We’ve had a great time. I bought so many USA baking pans that we had to get a luggage cart for them.”
The tables – one formal, one picnic-themed – featured Duncan & Miller glassware, and dozens of the cookies were displayed on the glassware. The glassware company produced some of the country’s most well-known and beautiful glassware at its Washington facility from 1893 until 1955.
Proceeds from Cookie Table University benefit the Monongahela Area Historical Society’s renovations of the Longwell House.
Magone said she was thrilled with the event and the efforts of all of the volunteers who worked for months to organize it. The event is sponsored by Washington County Tourism Promotion Agency.
“It’s been a beautiful day,” said Magone. “We’re here celebrating a cookie table tradition, but what we’re doing today is about far more than cookies. When this community comes together, we’re really celebrating things like kindness, civility, and generosity, and you all embody that. We need more of it in our world today.”