Christmas is the best time to hunt for all types of delicious cookies, from sweet chocolate chip to melt-in-the-mouth buttery cookies. The staple cookies for Christmas are gingerbread, butter shortbread, chocolate hazelnut cookies, and many others.
The classic sugar cookies come in vanilla flavoured biscuits. The dough is cut into desired shapes and decorated beautifully with icing in colourful festive colours of green, red, and white for Christmas.
Here in Malaysia, cookie artist Valene Lam has been making exquisitely decorated cookies since 2012 for all festivite celebrations, and selling them online under her label Mycookiestory (@mycookiestory on Instagram).
However, it’s not just the stunning edible art on the cookies that presents a story, the cookie maker herself has a special story, too.
Before she began baking cookies, Lam was facing a difficult time in her life and struggling with a stomach disease.
She suffered from severe gastric pain and bloated stomach without knowing the exact cause or diagnosis despite many scans, endoscopies and medical check-ups by specialists. Even after various medical treatments to ease her pain, she failed to completely cure her illness.
“It was a depressing phase, juggling a stressful position as a business manager ... while trying my best to feel better from the unknown disease,” revealed Lam.
Lam had to swallow 30 different types of pills and medication, adopt a very strict diet and visit specialists every two weeks to adjust her medical treatment.
During the long wait, she saw a Hello Kitty icing cookie post on the internet and that sparked her interest and inspired her to read up everything about cookies. Noticing this, her husband bought the basic baking tools and encouraged her to follow her heart.
“I actually forgot the miserable feelings about my gastro health, as I drifted my attention to something new and ‘sweet’, and that was how I always described Mycookiestory – as my journey of healing,” explained Lam.
Since then, she has been focusing on her little cookie shop and has never looked back. Life is sweet, after all!
In fact, this Christmas will be one of the rare occasions that Lam will be taking a break from baking, as she is preparing for the birth of her second child this month.
Nevertheless, she graciously took the time to speak to theSun, and to share her inspiring cookie journey.
Your cookies are beautifully decorated. How do you come up with ideas for creative decorations?
“I love combining different techniques, designs, and creative trends into the form of cookies. In the cookie world, we call it ‘cookie-fy’. For example, turning someone’s favourite pet, vehicle, food, portrait, plants, fashion, branding, labels, products, or anything you can think of, and making them into cookies.
“Very often, our clients are the greatest source of inspiration. Their requests for the designs always have a delicate meaning for their recipients and it is out of sincere thoughts, care and love.
“One of the most important sources for our inspiration and creativity to grow wild and strong in creating beautiful cookies is the trust we gain from our clients. The freedom for us to create is the greatest encouragement and confidence.
“I believe I have the responsibility to not only deliver a set of baked goods, but together with the special thoughts and wishes our clients would want their recipients to receive. That is very important as it is our brand objective: ‘Mycookiestory – As every cookie tells a special story.’”
What is your most innovative design?
“This will probably be the fidget spinner cookie. I have a regular customer, who orders cookies for her daughter’s birthday every year.
“One year her request was to make the fidget spinner into the form of cookies.
“The idea was cool, fun spinning cookies before you munch them. To make spinning cookies between your fingers was something really cool, we were glad that we made it happen!”
What is the most challenging part in making or decorating the cookies?
“It is great fun to take on the challenge to make something you have never made before. Many bakers will agree with this, being a creative baker [means] you need skills other than just baking.
“Making beautiful edible art entails lots of other skills that you might have not imagined.
“We need to be a graphic designer, to illustrate and realise the vision of the project; an architect to organise the detailed plans and measure the feasibility of the vision project; an engineer to execute the plan and make sure every detail is assembled right; a baker to bake the core project well, to make sure nothing is burnt and to ensure it tastes as good as it looks; a photographer – you never want to miss the chance to record the final art pieces after many sleepless nights of hard work – and finally, a delicate packer and despatch person, nothing else beats the pressure for every baker to send the delicate final product out from their doors to the hands of their customers.”
What is the most memorable cookie you ever made?
“Although, I have been making cookies for many years, sometimes not everything will go as planned, even on the most common thing.
“I remember one time a batch of butter from our regular supplier was not of the usual quality, resulting in softer cookies after baking. This incident caused huge damage to one large batch of our cookies.
“The cookies turned out to be more ‘tender’ and crumbly than usual, and they broke during the process of decorating. It was a nightmare having to redo over 300 cookies overnight.
“I was really thankful to my team who responded so quickly, and immediately we rolled them all over.
“Lesson learned – even on the simplest thing, [we should] not take things for granted.
“Besides that, there were a few very challenging cookies projects that we will never forget. There were a few projects that required very fine details for the [designs] of luxury brands.
“The requirement for the presentation of the cookies is top-notch, especially when it involves the brand’s reputation; the logo, colour and design must comply strictly with company policies.
“It is very challenging especially when we had to maintain the mass hand-made production, [according to] the highest quality and standard.
“With all our sweet efforts and teamwork, we take pride and satisfaction in our final results. It is our responsibility that every single cookie must be well designed and details are on point as per the cookie draft.”
What are signature cookies, flavours and best-sellers?
“For most occasions, our signature cookie flavour is vanilla butter as the base of decorated cookies.
“Vanilla butter cookies are light in colour and they are suitable for most designs so that the icing decorations will look more outstanding over a light coloured cookie.
“On special occasions, we will have different flavours to suit the festivals and seasons. For example, on Halloween we will have pumpkin spice as an option.
“For Christmas, we will have [options such as] gingerbread cookies and holiday spices.
“One of my favourite cookie flavours during the special seasons is double chocolate, as it releases a heavenly scent whenever we bake them.”
