Frosting the snowman: Augusta bakeries churning out festive cookies for Christmas

Two Moms Cookies on Central Avenue might be sold out of all its Christmas cookies Thursday before the Augusta bakery closes for the holidays.

“We always have a bunch of extras on the last day, and it's kind of first-come, first-served – whoever comes here first to get them,” co-owner Maggie Douglas said Wednesday.

And a lot of people get them. Though the bakery’s oatmeal raisin cookies are a popular customer choice year-round, since opening in 2011, a cornerstone of Two Moms’ business has been preparing custom-shaped, custom-decorated sugar cookies for special events, especially Christmas.

A plain sugar cookie is just a cookie until they’re frosted in cheery colors and shaped to resemble candy canes, Christmas trees and Santa Claus, Douglas said.

“It’s the same cookie, the same taste as all of them,” she said. “They’re just decorated differently. It’s very festive and there’s always an occasion for a cookie.”

Jessica Wells, owner of Ms. Stugie’s Cookie Shoppe, bakes bespoked cookies for holidays and other special occasions. Customers, she said, “love the simplicity of a nice, good-tasting cookie. ‘Does it look good?’ and ‘Does it taste good?’”

Known for its innovative ingredients, Ms. Stugie’s seasonal cookies include the Mint Condition, a mint chocolate cookie with white- and milk-chocolate drizzle and garnished with crushed peppermint.

There’s also the cinnaMAN, the bakery’s custom take on snickerdoodles, and You Are a Mean One, a green sugar cookie dipped in powdered sugar and topped with a tiny red-frosting heart.

Wells also offers sugar cookie sets especially for parents who enjoy sharing the Elf on the Shelf holiday tradition with their children. Customers provide the elves and Ms. Stugie’s provides several options of cookies to pose with the holiday dolls. One option spells out a child’s name in letter-shaped cookies left blank for families who can decorate them with provided frosting.

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“You can create those memories with your little ones,” Wells said. “I also like to tell parents it’s a great distraction for your kids while you’re cooking.”

Dolce Darlin’ on Telfair Street has earned a reputation for nontraditional holiday foods, including a Christmas Day lasagna. As for Christmas cookies, customer favorites on the menu include a knowing nod to the holidays.

Owner Cat Musgrove features an oatmeal creme pie, “which is what my grandmother made at Christmastime,” she said, with streaks of red and green cream-cheese frosting. One of the bakery’s “ultimate cookies,” its chocolate chip, includes red and green M&M chocolate candies.

Traditional sugar cookies at Dolce during December also have been decorated each week to honor popular Christmas movies and TV shows such as Elf, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

Many of Dolce’s Christmas cookie orders are for special occasions “but we work really hard to give people exactly what they want and what they needed,” Musgrove said.

This week, she said Dolce is “doing what we're calling A Few of Our Favorite Things. Everybody in the family got to pick their favorite cookies, but sugar cookies didn’t actually make the cut for that.”

Is there a secret to baking the perfect Christmas cookie?

“Yes, there is, because people have tried it and say, ‘Mine don’t ever get like that,’” said Douglas, Two Moms’ co-owner.

“But there is a secret. And I know what that secret is,” she added without elaborating.

This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Want a cookie? Christmas favorites fill shelves of Augusta bakeries