HANSON – It’s beginning to look a lot like cookie season, so who better to learn the fine art of sugar cookie decorating from than a woman wearing a “Your neighborhood cookie lady” T-shirt?
Joanna Letourneau, owner of custom home cookie bakery, the Blackbird Baking Co., in Pembroke, and friend Gina Kirk, owner of online coffee and apparel retailer, Mom Life Must Haves and her barista business Mug & Moment in Middleborough, hosted a breakfast and cookie decorating workshop at Camp Kiwanee’s Needles Lodge Sunday. Nov. 5.
Kirk also hosts the “Permanently Exhausted Podcast” devoted to what “life is like behind the scenes of it all,” on several platforms including I-Heart and Spotify.
“I feel like this is the perfect time,” Letourneau said – not only for cookies, but also to think of neighbors who count on the food pantry. “The food pantry is always in need [and] everybody forgets about Thanksgiving.”
She also is keenly aware of the need for the food pantry through her work with the Plymouth Housing Authority.
“I know that the elderly and disabled [especially] don’t have a lot of family,” Letourneau said. “They don’t have a lot of money and I know a lot of them rely on the Fire House Food Pantry. A call for donations to those signed up for the cookie workshop brought in a tote and a couple bags of donations for the Thanksgiving dinner fixings.
Then the group of about 28 women got down to the business of learning to make six seasonal-themed cookies – a puffy pillow, stack of pancakes, a white pumpkin, a travel coffee cup, a sweater and an ‘Ugg boot’ – in order to learn the techniques of working with royal icing.
In the process, they were supporting area women-owned businesses, including those of Letourneau, Kirk and A Fork in the Road restaurant and catering of the Bryantville area in Hanson, which supplied the breakfast of quiches, pastry, fruit and yogurt parfaits, as well as those they in turn support with their business.
“This time of year is kind of my ‘cookie marathon’ from Halloween to Christmas,” Letourneau said. “There’s baking cookies, a lot of classes and I do pre-orders – essentially ahead of time.”
She posts a form with the season options at eatgoodcookiesma.com from which customers can choose, along with inventory levels. Letourneau has just completed a rebrand of her website that went live Monday, Nov. 6.
“People go on and purchase it, with a pre-designated pick-up time, so that I know exactly how much to make and when people are coming,” she said.
“I do custom cookies and cookie-decorating classes,” Letourneau said. “Myself and Gina, who owns several businesses, one of which is the coffee subscription and apparel business, thought it would be fun to have a ladies’ event on a Sunday – coffee, breakfast, cookie decorating – and we kind of put a turn on it by having women-owned businesses donate raffle items.”
The prizes ranged from $100 gift certificates to gift baskets.
“All of these businesses are ones that I personally use,” she said of her way of advertising them and giving back.
Once cookie class commenced, Letourneau walked participants through the techniques of outlining and then ‘flooding’ decorative designs after participants learned to knead their tubes of homemade icing to warm them and evenly distribute the coloring as they practiced the steps in decorating.
“We are going to skip around a lot,” she said of the varied steps involved in each type of cookie.
A practice sheet afforded participants the chance to practice piping designs ad flooding them in before transferring the skills to a cookie.
Letourneau, who works for Plymouth public housing and with the police academy and the sheriff’s department, began the cookie business after dabbling in homemade cookies for family and friends while on family leave from the sheriff’s department.
“I’ve always been a kind of go-go-go kind of person, and it was something to kind of pass the time,” she said. “I’ve always kind of been a perfectionist/crafty person, so it was like a hobby.”
Then friends began asking for custom cookies for their kids’ birthday parties and before she knew it, she was doing a firefighter set as favors for a first birthday party on a professional basis.
“It kind of snowballed,” she said, noting she is a licensed residential kitchen owner through the Pembroke Board of Health, which inspects her kitchen. “I had never anticipated it being a business and now it’s kind of like the juggling act of work and business to grow the business, but also in a place where I can still manage my life.”
Kirk was doing barista duty with a menu of three choices: a cold brew with choice of sweet cream, white chocolate or dark chocolate cold cream; sugar cookie of gingerbread flavored hot coffee and a DYI hot or cold brew coffee bar,
She started her own coffee line in 2018 under the name Surviving Motherhood Coffee, Kirk explained.
“My kids were all younger and things kind of evolved over the years,” she said. “But I have always worked with a local roaster.”
Her Mug & Moment coffees are all roasted in Bridgewater in small batches. Kirk works with her roaster to develop exclusive flavors in small batches. That small family-owned roaster, in turn, works with small family-owned coffee growers in Brazil and Colombia.
“Basically, it was born out of a desire to have better coffee,” Kirk said. “It’s been a journey.
She rebranded from Mom Life Must Haves to Mug & Moment last year just to be a little more inclusive.”
The business’ website is now mugandmoment.com, and while she started in a storefront in Middleborough, the business is all online now.
“I pick up the coffee in Middleborough and ship it out from my little space,” she said.
For more information, contact Letourneau at eatgoodcookiesma.com, or email at blackbirdbakingco@yahoo.com. Contact Kirk at mlmhandco.com or visit @mlmhandco on Instagram, fb.com/mlmhandco on Facebook or email hello@mlmhandco.com.