And Now Amanda Gorman Is A Cookie
When National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman took the podium at Joe Biden's inauguration, in her vivid yellow coat and her skin glowing like she had swallowed sunshine, delivering a message of hope and courage in her poem "The Hill We Climb," it was clear she had arrived. But the moment she truly made it? That wasn't later that day, when her two books (not even released yet) all shot to bestseller status. It wasn't when she was asked to appear at the Super Bowl, or when she signed with a modeling agency in the days afterward.
No. It was when she became a cookie.
"Her poem was exactly what we needed," says Katrin Schnippering, a baker in Barrington, Rhode Island, who specializes in artistic cookie renderings. Inspired by Gorman's performance, Schnippering went into the kitchen and created a set of cookies with a portrait Gorman as the centerpiece, surrounded by sunshine and roses. "I have a good friend who turned 60 the next day who's a person like that—very bright, very light," Schnippering says. "She would have deserved a big party and that wasn't possible. So I made that cookie, and the lights were for her."
Gorman learned about the cookies and shared them on her Instagram. "So happy she saw it and just a tad unreal," Schnippering wrote on her own account.
Amanda Gorman isn't the only famous person who Schnippering has turned into a cookie. She also made a set of three cookies, one of the Bernie Sanders photo that became a meme, accompanied by two heart-shaped cookies that say "S'mitten" and "with you!" There's also a Stacey Abrams set with Abrams' likeness and a heart that says "You are a peach!" Besides politicians and trending news, she also makes kits featuring David Bowie (her favorite) and Harry Styles (her daughter's favorite). The sets are available on her website and sell for $15-$49.
Schnippering is originally from Germany, though she has lived in New England for 10 years. Her treats are inspired by the cookies she grew up eating. "I just missed German baked goods," she says. She ships her cookies all over the country, both already decorated and in sets customers can decorate themselves.
"There's a lot of cookie people selling cookies and cookie kits," she says. "I like to be a little bit different. It's nice to put some weight into them and make them a little bit different from all the other cookie kits you can buy."