ST. PAUL, Minn. — If you need a specific shape of cookie cutter, chances are high that Meghan Gordon has it.
Gordon, the owner of St. Paul home cookie bakery The Chocolate Chickadee, stores her collection of around 1,500 cookie cutters in a dedicated closet, organized by theme and tracked via a digital database list on her iPad.
One massive plastic tote is marked “Animals.” An entire drawer is “Wedding,” and under that are drawers for “Baby” and “Birthday” — not to be confused with a nearby basket marked “Birthday Characters,” of course. There are florals and Christmas shapes and “Things Around The House” and food and music and a “Graduation” bin and spots for pop culture characters from Winnie the Pooh to Minnie Mouse to Labubus.
Not long ago, another baker posted on a national cookie-related Facebook page Gordon follows asking if anyone in the Twin Cities area happened to have a tractor-shaped cutter they might borrow. Gordon does, of course, and when that baker swung by Gordon’s house to pick it up, the two started chatting.
What if there were a better system for this — a lending library of sorts for cookie cutters?
So Gordon logged onto Facebook and started a new group.
As of mid-October, the group, “Cookie Cutter Borrow and Swap (Minnesota),” has around 60 members and has already hosted a handful of trades. (The group is open to anyone regardless of cookie experience, but for security reasons, users must request to join and be approved by an administrator.)
As the group’s creator and herself the owner of a prodigious cookie-cutter collection, Gordon knows she’ll probably be a major lender at least for now, but the broader goal is to establish a mutual exchange and support network that doesn’t need to involve her at all, she said. After all, she said, there are bakers in the Twin Cities with even more cookie cutters — and baking experience — than she has.
“It’s not just my show, I’m hoping it will be the Twin Cities cookie community’s show,” she said. “I envisioned the page as a way for bakers to share questions, problems, ‘How do I get into cookies?’, anything from beginning to advanced. Coming together as a community to support each other.”
Gordon started the Chocolate Chickadee in 2020, after her previous longtime job as a nanny evaporated when the COVID pandemic began. At that point, she’d been baking as a hobby for about a decade or so, since around the last time she made a significant career change — when she and her husband wrapped up some 16 years as professional ballroom dancers.
For the first year or so of the Chocolate Chickadee, Gordon made a variety of baked goods, but quickly realized she needed to narrow her scope.
“And then I found cookies, and it was like the heavens opened up and shined down upon me and I realized what I’m doing for the rest of my life,” she said. “I love the intricacy, I love the creativity, I love the artistry. I love that it’s feeding people, it’s giving people joy, it’s commemorating special events.”
Now, six years later, it’s more than a full-time gig for her; an average week sees Gordon put in 60 hours and produce around 10 to 15 dozen cookies.
“It’s quite literally all that I do, is cookies,” she said. “I hang out with my husband occasionally. I take care of my dogs occasionally. But I just make cookies all day long, every single day, and it’s the best life in the world.”
It’s probably no surprise, then, that Gordon wants to help more people be “cookie-ers,” too. She teaches classes, during which she happily shares her personal recipes for both cookies and icing. When she receives a customer inquiry she’s too busy to accept, she’ll post on Facebook — previously on her business page; now in the cookie-cutter swap group — asking if any other upstart bakers are available to accept the order. The way Gordon sees it, and the animating spirit behind the Facebook group, is that more cookie-bakers means more collaboration, not more competition.
“I have taught lots of other cookie-ers around town; they come in and take classes from me,” Gordon said. “And I know that they use that skill in their own business, and I think that’s amazing. That means they now have a new skill, that I started them on that journey, and that makes me feel really good. They feel more confident in their cookies. A customer just got a more experienced set of cookies. Everybody wins.”