Single Girl Cookies: How an Astoria woman baked her heart whole again
I grew up in a baking-centered household. My mom baked everything from birthday cakes to thousands of batches of our family’s secret-recipe chocolate chip cookies. These cookies went everywhere with us—to dance classes, Girl Scout meetings, 4-H meetings, play rehearsals, everywhere. There was not, nor is there now, a person in my small hometown who has not experienced one of these famous chocolate chip cookies.
Baking and sharing was just our family way. It is a part of my DNA, just like those cookies that everyone refers to by our last name: Heitmann Cookies.
In fall of 2011, I went through a terrible breakup with a man I had been living with. I needed a new apartment, had recently started two new jobs and was about to turn 30. By the time Thanksgiving came around, I had a brand new life that I hardly recognized. I was someone I hardly recognized. Everything in my life was new and nothing was the same as it had been just months before, including my love of fall baking. How could I feel inspired to create and bake when I didn’t know how to define myself anymore? Not only that, now I had no one to share with—no friends, an apathetic roommate whom I did not know and no desire to do anything except figure out what life was to be now.
As the months passed, my life began to settle. It was fall again, and I had a year’s worth of growth under my belt. I had a lovely new roommate. Work was going well. Most importantly, I was baking again. That’s how I really knew I was getting back to myself.
The problem with two fall seasons’ worth of baking pouring out at once is that you end up with a lot of sweets, more than one or two people can handle. It occurred to me that I hadn’t visited my local deli in a while—a year—because it was one of my ex’s favorite lunch spots. I reasoned that the people behind such a superior deli would know and value good food, and would appreciate some baked goods. So I brought them some.
I had no idea that such a simple act of kindness would shape my life in ways I’d never imagined. I shared mini pumpkin cheesecakes with the deli’s staff. I came back and shared pumpkin bread, and butternut squash soup and, of course, chocolate chip cookies. I got to know the workers, and had a conversation with one that changed the way I view my fellow humans. My gesture made a difference to her. My eyes were opened to a world of kindness possibilities, all because of a cookie.
I knew this couldn’t be the last time I felt this rush. I’d made a positive impact on someone and I couldn’t stop; it felt too good to make someone else feel lifted up and thought of. I continued connecting with my neighborhood by using the best conduit I knew—a chocolate chip cookie. Single Girl Cookies was born—my mission became to spread kindness, one cookie at a time. Every week, I drop off a plate of cookies at a different Astoria business. After a few days, I return to pick up my plate, and get a recommendation for where to donate my next batch. I call it “baking it forward”.
And so the start of my new life came only with the death of the old one. With flour on my cheek and dough on my hands, I rebuilt who I was. Back in that colorful, loud apartment I shared with my ex, I felt smothered, quieted, as if I had to shrink myself to be digestible and likable. Don’t rock the boat, be agreeable. But in this new place, with its cream walls and streams of sunlight—I could be loud and colorful and vibrant. I could make mistakes.
Not enough flour in your cookie dough and they’ll be flat. Too much flour and they’ll be overly dense. I could create baking masterpieces or disasters and share them with the world. And it didn’t matter which it was, because each batch—masterpiece or disaster—was an invisible thread connecting me to my community and those around me. Each cookie and cupcake was a new piece added to the new puzzle of whom I was becoming.
Now when autumn comes around and leaves are dying on the branch, I don’t feel “the end” of things. I feel their beginnings.
