The cookie artist

Tracy Stahl often gets the same reaction when she displays the final products from her side business.

“That’s a cookie?”

Stahl’s cookies double as works of art made in her Fredonia home, where she runs Frosted Flour Cookie Co.

Traditional seasonal icons of Santa, four-leaf clovers and ghosts that come with exquisite detail mix in with unique designs such as winter coats and hats, light sabers and baby pajamas and rattles.

“Life is full of occasions,” Stahl said. “I think this business encourages people to celebrate a little bit more. Cookies give me that excitement to create.”

Then there are the custom orders, which can really get her creative juices flowing. She once created a cookie that looked just like a nerve stimulator for a medical equipment company.

When a cookie cutter doesn’t exist for a requested treat, Stahl designs ones herself. A friend with a 3D printer handles the manufacturing.

It’s not that Stahl doesn’t have a host of tools. Hundreds of cookie cutters worth thousands of dollars fill drawers in her corner office down the hall from the kitchen, and most aren’t made of the traditional material. Stahl got away from metal cutters because they can bend if they get bumped. Most today come from 3D printers, she said.

Stahl started her business in 2022, basically due to requests. She had been designing cookies for family and friends for years, and others began asking for cookies.

“I think it kind of just turned into a business because people liked what I was doing,” Stahl said.

She started selling cookies at the farmers market, then created a Frosted Flour Cookie Co. Facebook page, which serves as her storefront.

Stahl knows she isn’t alone in the space — the cookie industry has boomed — but she said there’s room for everyone.

“I think every cookier has their own style,” she said. “People don’t fight for customers.”

Stahl, a Waupaca native, began her hobby like many others. Her family decorated cookies for Christmas. Her grandmother Theresa Burns taught her how to bake, and Stahl still has some of her equipment in her office.

Stahl loved art since she was a child, and cookie decorating melds both passions.

“I’ve always been an artist. To couple that with baking set my heart on fire,” she said.

Stahl’s favorite part of cookie decorating is putting on the icing.

“When I flood the cookie and it melts down to this smooth surface. It’s very satisfying,” she said.

She creates her own royal icing that hardens quickly but still offers a soft bite, “and then you do your magic” to decorate the cookies.

Stahl creates some accessories, known as transfers in the cookie world, ahead of time, such as snowmen noses.

Some popular cookie shapes are also baked ahead of time and vacuum frozen to be decorated later. She posts her selection on Facebook for orders.

She uses a rolling pin that doesn’t have handles. Using her arms, she said, allows her more control to develop consistent thickness of the dough.

Large orders, such as 250 individually wrapped cookies for a company last summer, sometimes give her bruises on her arms.

She bakes cookies in the regular oven in her kitchen — but her office has some unique equipment, including Eddie the edible ink printer. Accompanying software allows Stahl to print on cookies, rotating a dozen one by one on a circular sheet. The machine can also print on marshmallows and M&Ms.

Stahl loves the technology and is still learning its capabilities, but she doesn’t want to lose the artistry of the hobby.

“I like the creativity of it where I can put art onto the cookie,” she said.

She isn’t in it for the money.

“It’s kind of a hobby. So many hours that go into making a cookie. I do it because I love it. If I do make any money, it goes into equipment,” she said.

“It has to be a passion for somebody to do it because there’s no money in it.”

Stahl recently added drop cookies to her product line — January’s is called blizzard — that helps her bottom line.

Decorating cookies has become more special after a bout with cancer in 2019. Stahl took a break, then created a cookie for a cancer ribbon, and reconnected with her hobby.

“I think it’s kind of therapeutic for me,” she said.

Regardless of decor, Stahl said she makes sure her products meet the real cookie test before selling any.

“It’s all about the taste. If they don’t taste good, they don’t go out the door,” she said.

Stahl makes her own vanilla for flavor.

“It’s one that everybody loves,” she said.

For fall-themed cookies, Stahl does a caramel flavor.

Business can pick up at any time with custom orders, but it is seasonal. Stahl is between her busiest times of Christmas and Valentine’s Day.

She is passing on her passion to others by running her own classes. She has taught cookie decorating since 2012 and recently increased the frequency to two to three sessions per month. Class sizes have ranged from one to 18 people, and they have been taught from her home, the Fredonia Adult Day Center, Buechler Farms in Belgium and Random Arts Collective in Random Lake.

Students leave with their own decorated cookies and usually about five icing bags of various consistencies.

Stahl works on cookies every day, fitting it around her job as creativity coordinator for the Fredonia Adult Day Center. She leads art classes for clients and handles marketing and social media for the center.

Stahl still paints when she can as well. She likes doing landscapes on little rocks and hiding them around Fredonia. She asks people to post photos of their finds in the Rock On Fredonia Facebook group.

It’s a challenge to be able to fit such picturesque scenes on small items. Finding rocks is another challenge.

“My head’s always down,” she said.

Stahl has clients at the day center paint rocks and leave them out front where people may take and hide them.

Stahl has more time for both hobbies since her last of three children grew up. She paints rocks while riding in an RV to visit them in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Colorado.

It’s her edible art that gets the most attention, however. The cookies, she said, serve as nice gifts for mail carriers, hairdressers and others when people don’t know what to give.

“It’s a great way to say thank you without a little trinket sitting there,” Stahl said. “It’s thoughtful. It’s cute. It’s delicious.”