Confection Affection Only Thing Small About Baker’S Operation Is The Size Of Her 90,000 Cookies

Thelma Bauman bakes Christmas cookies. That’s not unusual, considering the time of year, but she bakes lots of cookies.

This year alone, she cooked up 90,000.

Working out of a basement kitchen in her unassuming South Hill home, Bauman, 67, makes and sells decorative Christmas cookies every year from the end of August until Dec. 10.

During that time, she often works 12-hour days, seven days a week. In the three and a half months that she bakes, she uses 3,500 cups of flour, 765 pounds of shortening, and well over 500 pounds of sugar.

She can make up to 4,500 cookies a day, depending on the type of cookie.

Bears and wreaths and snowmen and stars, each decorated by hand. She makes 30 different types of cookies, and the list reads like a cookie monster fantasy: lemon caps, maple bars, snow balls, chocolate bears, butter cookies, cream wafers.

While each cookie is different, they’re all tiny.

Small cookies are Bauman’s signature. She hates big cookies. When she was young, she said, she ate large cookies and when she didn’t like them, still had to finish the whole thing.

She swore that, “If I ever bake cookies, I’m going to make them small so that if I don’t like them, there won’t be that much to eat.”

People can’t get enough of them.

While she refuses to advertise - “If people want my cookies, they can come and get them,” she said - people find out anyway. This year she attracted so many customers she had to turn down orders.

Except for a few instances where cases of cookies are shipped cross-country, Bauman and her husband personally deliver the cookies to their customers. The reason, Bauman said, is because the cookies could be damaged.

“I don’t want my cookies broken. Not the arm of one bear, or a wreath. No, no, no.” That just won’t do, she insisted.

So she and her husband take two trips a year to the west side of the state, taking a route from Portland to Tacoma, then Seattle and on up to Mercer Island, dropping off orders to boutiques or to individuals at prearranged places, such as restaurants. Bauman counts many of her long-standing customers as friends.

Locally, the cookies are carried by Simply Northwest, a gift-service shop on East Sprague. The gourmet cookies are sold in packages of five dozen for $15.

Simply Northwest owner De Scott said she has carried the cookies for nine years and they are extremely popular.

“They’re really a sellout every year,” she said.

“It’s fabulous what she does with them. Each little cookie has its own personality.”