Le Cordon Bleu Pastry Chef Bakes 15,000 Cookies for Troops
Las Vegas pastry chef Brenda Villatoro and her students at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts baked 15,000 cookies for troops this holiday season, a sweet thank you to those who serve in the military.
“I come from a patriotic family. We always had a flag out front of our little house back in Queens,” says Villatoro. Her older brother, Stevie, was drafted to Vietnam, along with many of her friends. “When soldiers returned from that war, they didn’t receive a warm welcome, and it just broke my heart,” she says.
She wants to make sure that today’s troops know how much they are appreciated. Many of Villatoro’s students at Le Cordon Bleu are veterans. About 100 of 500 students enrolled at the college have served, estimates Sharon Fredericks, Careers Services Advisor and Veterans Club Advisor at Le Cordon Bleu.
Villatoro and her students began baking cookies to thank the troops in 2006, producing 3,000 cookies for donation that holiday season. Since then, they have challenged themselves to bake more. One year they hit the 7,000 mark and the next year the students pushed to break 10,000. Last year they made 13,800 cookies, and this year they reached 15,000.
They rely on a combination of donations from the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Le Cordon Bleu and its purveyors, and community sponsors to fund the effort. The assortment of cookies range from simple chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, peanut butter, scotcharoos, and pumpkin chocolate chip with walnuts to skillfully decorated sugar cookies, gingerbread men and piped Christmas butter cookies.
They have a Facebook page and last year they got the attention of two local news programs. One station even awarded Villatoro a Certificate of Kindness.
Villatoro and about 8 students start right after Halloween. “We make the cookies then shingle them on sheet pans then I wrap them and put them in the freezer,” she says. “I teach from 10 in the morning to 6 at night. After 6 p.m. is when I make the cookies but sometimes students come in earlier and do the scaling and the mixing. I’ll take whatever help I can get.”
Volunteers from local Nellis Air Force Base then put the cookies on pallets and ship them overseas. This year, the Nellis volunteers picked up 92 boxes. They even do airdrops so that soldiers who are in remote areas that are inaccessible by roads can receive the cookies. Nellis has delivered these cookies to troops in Afghanistan, Djbouti, Jordan, and Iraq.
Every cookie is decorated by hand. The cookies arrive with a handwritten note and uplifting jokes. Chef Brenda also includes photographs of the cookies being made. “So the troops can see the love this country has for them,” she says.
“Brenda Villatoro is a selfless woman,” says Sharon Fredericks. “Not only does she spend months on these cookies, she then takes thousands of them to the Southern Nevada Veterans Hospital in North Las Vegas for a Cookies with Santa event. Some of our student veterans on campus go there for treatment. We visit the clinics at the hospital and even the patients’ rooms.”
Some of the students were themselves recipients of these care packages during their tour of duty, and now they come together to support the project. William Stine, a U.S. Navy Seal, helps Chef Brenda every year. Another student, Edward Wiesing, belongs to the Marine Riders, a veterans’ motorcycle group that provides a team of 12 motorcycle reindeer as escorts to the Cookies with Santa event.
Villatoro graduated from Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, then worked for Albert Kumin, Director of International Pastry Arts Center and President Carter’s former pastry chef.
She jokes about her decision to go into the culinary arts. “Two careers are always going to have jobs: Hairdressers and chefs. Women are vain and people have to eat.”
When Villatoro came to Las Vegas, she was one of the only female chefs on the Strip. Baking for Excalibur, Caesar’s Palace, and MGM Grand, she grew accustomed to cooking on a large scale and working fast.
“But the tremendous amount of cookies could not be made without assistance of Le Cordon Bleu students who swap their white chef hats for red velvet hats with pointed ears and bells,” she says. “The students loving refer to themselves as my cookie elves. Together we spend countless hours scaling, mixing, scooping, baking, and decorating thousands of cookies.”
If you would like to send cookies to the troops, here are instructions, along with a few baking tips to ensure freshness and recipes for cookies that work best, courtesy of All Recipes.
Chef Brenda smiles when recalling a letter from serviceman Lyndon Searles, stationed in Kabul. He received her cookies and delivered some to a coalition of Macedonians and Germans, who came back to him with half a box. “They thought they’d take enough for themselves and share the rest,” he wrote. “I just wanted to pass on how important your delivery was to a group of folks with different backgrounds and traditions brought together by your cookies.”
