That divine smell wafting up from the High Desert is most likely emanated from the loving ovens of Bend Cookie Company. Gina Lannin, owner of Bend Cookie Company, is baking up beautiful batches of gourmet cookies and hand-decorated sugar cookies from their commercial kitchen in Scandia Square.
Started in March 2010 in their home, the idea struck when she and her family had been traveling around South America for a year and came back to Bend to settle down. Finding no businesses for sale and not many jobs, they needed to come up with something to help support the family. Cookies were the golden goose.
“My husband, Sean, was in the food industry for fifteen years and we thought – “Hey, let’s bake cookies, they make everybody happy,” and Bend Cookie Company was born. It’s great making people smile with food.”
Lannin hand-scoops all the dough and bakes these sweet miracles in flavors of chocolate chip, snickerdoodle, chocolate blackout, oatmeal raisin, cinnamon cranberry oatmeal, peanut butter and a toasted toffee pecan.
“We also do a classic sugar sprinkle cookie using multi-colored sanding sugar,” she said. “Kids and adults love them and they’re very festive. Around Christmas we bake seasonal ginger-spice cookies too, a really flavorful, moist cookie, much softer than a ginger snap.”
Lannin laughs when people think the decorated sugar cookies are too beautiful to eat until they taste them and get over it fast with the first bite.
“We make a butter cream icing which is unusual, most people use a crunchy royal icing and it doesn’t have a lot of flavor. The butter cream frosting gives them a moist mouth feel. I use all natural ingredients and all our baked goods have a clean, memorable taste and flavor.”
The cookie queen and her small staff bake Monday through Friday. The most enjoyable part for her is that moment where she delivers custom cookies and the people see their life on a cookie, or they sample one and she sees people’s eyes roll back in their heads.
“My husband came up with the recipes for all the cookies. He baked batch after batch until he got the taste and texture just right. All our cookies are made to be crisp around the edges and soft in the middle. I think he went through over twenty-five different chocolate chip recipes before he got it right. That was the hardest one.”
Bend Cookie Company’s specialty is the custom decorated sugar cookies that can be designed in an infinite variety of styles, themes and colors.
“One of our regular customers called and said it was her son’s birthday and he’s a baseball player,” she recalled. “So we pulled up a picture of his school logo and uniform colors for a design to follow and did a whole edible baseball set including his baseball cap, school jersey, bats, balls and personalized it with his name.”
Lannin believes she has nearly one thousand cookie cutters to design sugar cookies for all of life’s many holidays, occasions and celebrations.
“We’ve done business gifts and parties and birthdays, weddings and anniversaries. I don’t think we’ve done a funeral yet but we’ve done almost every other occasion.”
In addition to traditional cookies, Bend Cookie Company sells decadent fudge brownies with a white chocolate swirl or peanut butter swirl.
“Right now we want to focus our business doing corporate gifts,” she said. “We hear from our business customers that their friends and clients receiving our cookies as gifts are loving them and find them very delicious and personal. I love assisting clients to bring their ideas to life through cookies and welcome a chance to help for corporate or individual presents.”
“We did these snowman cookies for a client one Christmas and of all the gifts they received over the holidays those cookies were the ones they remembered most. And we’re told companies are getting a lot of bang for their purchasing dollars. The biggest holiday for cookies is Christmas by far, with Valentine’s Day a close second. It’s a fun job and I truly love it.”
For cookie orders, people can either call and pick them up fresh at the bakery or have them delivered locally or shipped nationwide. They’re also available at Newport Avenue Market, their major retail spot, and discovered at various coffee shops and lunch spots around Bend, Redmond and Sisters.
541-977-9177.
