Baking cookies is her passion, decorating cookies is her art

WHEATLAND – There is a little-known gourmet cookie bakery located in Platte County and what started out as a hobby has turned into an operation of epic proportions.
Stacy Martin is the founder of Cookie Delights, a passion project that she hopes will remain a hobby. Around Christmas, her cookie hobby is no longer a best-kept secret as she is being inundated with orders from individuals and businesses alike from not only Platte County, but from all over the state.
“Cookie Delights because cookies delight me to create them,” Martin said. “Cookies delight people to give them to others and cookies delight people to eat them.”
Martin, a well-traveled woman who has been in the fast-food service industry for 30 years, has not always been a cookie baker. In fact, she didn’t embrace the concept until a few years ago when her mother requested Christmas cookies and then went on a shopping spree to buy her daughter all she would need to bake and decorate the perfect Christmas cookies.
To this day, her mother is still one of her biggest fans and is glad that she lit that fire under her daughter.
“She bought some icing and stuff from the store,” Martin said. “And then she wanted cookies for Easter and I was like, I’m not using that icing from the store, I want to learn how to make my own and do it the way these ladies do it with these beautiful $10 cookies.”

In the world of gourmet cookies, just the undecorated will cost a bundle. Nieman Marcus offers a box of small chocolate cookies for $30. Chelles Macaroons are $42 a box which again, offer no decoration, but different dough coloring.
Martin spends hours on her creations and loves to do orders where she can create every cookie as an individual work of art. Although she has learned much from YouTube, her artistic eye and her patience in the areas of airbrushing, mixing consistencies and knowing how to add just the perfect quaintness for each cookie makes her “delights” stand out from what you’d buy at a commercial big box store.
After Martin’s mom had gone overboard with buying Easter cookie supplies, Marin decided that she wanted to continue using the tools that were purchased long after the last Easter egg was colored. She dug in, she researched, she bought a projector, she learned about edible ingredients and her cinnamon and nutmeg baked sugar cookies became her canvas to reveal her artistic talents.
She started out by making cookies for fellow employees and for family and most would say that they were almost too beautiful to eat. But after a nibble, they couldn’t resist.
“I would just make cookies and give them as gifts,” she said. “People started telling me that I should sell my cookies. I would always just say no because I didn’t want any kind of hassle with getting business licenses or copyright regulations and figuring that all out. I just want to make my cookies.”
Martin then saw a post on Facebook this past October inquiring as to anyone who baked cookies. It opened the door for her destiny.
“As a hobby baker I can use copyright items,” she said. “I cannot bake or decorate these copyrighted items as a commercial baker.”
As of right now, Martin is using her mom’s kitchen to prepare, bake and create her cookies. She has a prep table, a food dehydrator so that the cookies cool faster, she has an airbrush machine and an entire pantry full of supplies.
She has to go into another room to pull out her many bins of cookie cutters that she uses. And when she doesn’t have a cookie-cutter that is up to her liking, she has learned how to cut the tin strips and creates her own personalized cutters.
To date, she has created cookies for many of the businesses in Platte County, and although creating the same design over and over, is not her favorite work, she never turns away a customer. Whether it’s a new business opening or cookies for a business’ employees, she is up to the task and here at the holidays is up all hours of the night baking, cutting, creating and decorating.
In just a short amount of time, she has created thousands of cookies and her passion is driving her to learn new things and to create even more spectacular designs. This week she was experimenting and making snow globe two-layer Christmas cookies that actually were mini snow globes.
Not only does she make cookies, but now has also branched out to making cookie bouquets that look like flowers in vases and custom cookies with business logo decorations. In fact, if you have a design or an idea, she can work magic in her tiny kitchen with the technology and the supplies she has.
Cookie Delights. So beautiful you may want to frame them. So yummy, you can’t help but eat them.
To place orders for cookies or for more information you can go to Martin’s Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/WheatlandCookies. Her page is like perusing a fine-art gallery, but fair warning it can cause hunger pangs and you may not want to visit if you are hungry.