by Tess Wilson

When Design*Sponge approached me about building a photo backdrop for their book release party, I instantly arranged a meeting (drinks at Locanda) with Leah Rosenberg, my dear friend, boss, and partner-in-cake-crime. Though Leah’s an incredible painter, and I like to dabble in embroidery and flower-arranging, when we work together there’s generally baking involved. Leah’s the head pastry chef for Blue Bottle Coffee in SFMOMA’s Rooftop Sculpture Garden, and I’m her assistant, and we’re happiest when we’re working up there in our little 6’x6’ kitchen. Our brainstorming session yielded quite a few excellent, edible ideas that we would need serious grant money to pull off, but our favorite reasonable one was the notion of a wall of cookies. The Glamorous Wall Of Cookies… Guests could have their picture taken, eat a cookie, and feel at peace with the world.

We went to work. I made a test batch of cookies just to play with sprinkles and such. I had the invaluable help of an enthusiastic 11-year-old, obviously a sprinkle & lustre-dust prodigy (she also took the photo).

Using the random marker colors we had on hand, Leah & I did a (very, very rough) sketch of the cookie wall, to entice the Design*Sponge team. They liked it! The Glamorous Wall of Cookies was a go.

I created a game plan in an Excel document to keep us on track. I don’t know if you can read my writing, but the only thing checked off is “Make a pointless Excel document”. 

Next, I grabbed a piece of wood and a few nails from home and brought them to the tiny kitchen. We experimented with making holes in the cookies and hanging them from the wood, creating what I like to call The Hobo Wall Of Terror.  Don’t be scared, it’s all part of the process.

Now that we felt confident that it was possible to hang cookies on a wall, we crunched the numbers and got started making 500 cookies. Remember: 6’x6’ kitchen. Our mixer can handle enough dough to make about 60 cookies, so we would be making 9 or 10 batches. As you can tell from her paintings and art cakes, Leah is incredibly skilled at creating and combining colors so she tinted her cookies confidently, but I still have so much to learn.

I tinted small amounts of dough at a time, scared I would ruin an entire batch.  This actually ended up working fine, as we were so inspired by Julia Rothman’s book tour illustrations. We wanted to capture all the subtle colors she used, as well as the d*s ribbons and the gorgeous book cover.

We rolled and cut the dough.

We punched holes in each one (we discovered that old-fashioned paper straws worked best).

And once all the cookies were baked, carefully layered them in Cambros, labeled with their quantity & (occasionally questionable) colors.

All the while, the task of building an actual wall (that could hold 500 cookies and wouldn’t fall on people) loomed. We admitted we’re really more cake-bakers than wall-builders, so we outsourced to our immensely talented friend Sam of Synth Island, who whipped up an elegant, sturdy design.  The three of us took a fieldtrip to Discount Builders, where every single person working helped us. They were all patient, efficient, friendly, and truly helpful.

We’d brought cookie “swatches” which we intended to share with all the employees….until I set them down in the wet color sample the nice paint boys whipped up for us. You see, it’s not enough to see what the cookies look like nearby the paint color- they really need to be all up in it. From the beginning, I’d been envisioning colorful cookies on a gold background- gold to reference the book cover and to add plenty of glamour. Leah gently reminded me that no paint would create the true-gold background I dreamed of- for that, we would need to gold-leaf the wall (we would still love to do this, so please contact us if you need a gold-leafed wall full of possibly edible-gold-leafed cookies. It would be gorgeous..). Instead of settling for a trying-to-be-gold-but-really-yellow effect, Leah had the great idea of using the pretty grey of the Design*Sponge website. When I put the cookies in the paint, the colors really popped, so we were satisfied.

We found everything we needed, and loaded it up in a Zipcar (one of 4 vehicle rentals involved in this project- none of us have a car, and I don’t even have a license).

The actual wall had to be built on the sidewalk in front of Sam’s apartment, as San Francisco apartments cannot accommodate very much lumber. Leah & I gridded out the holes for all of the nails (that took a few attempts), deciding to hang 2 cookies on each nail so the colors would change throughout the night of the party. I drilled, I broke the drillbit, she drilled, nailed, and painted, and I tried not to break anything else.  The day of the party arrived and Leah baked the hundreds of cookies in our little oven (referred to affectionately by guests as our Easy-Bake Oven). Our friend Kelly volunteered to be Leah’s lovely cookie wall assistant at the party, since I would be out of town. Excitement was running high! We love Design*Sponge, we love baking, and we love outlandish projects- I hope everyone at the event had as much fun as we did making the cookie wall!

Here are some photos taken at the event at Anthropologie.  You can see  Blair Sneddon’s photos of guests posing in front of the wall eating their cookies here!

Cookie wall by Leah Rosenberg and Tess Wilson. The cookies were dyed in custom colors to match the book. Everyone was invited to take a cookie and a photo! Proceeds from this event benefited the local arts charity Children’s Art Center.  Images by Blair Sneddon. See more cookie wall photos here!