Renae, a member of our staff, came up with a way our department could use our kitchen resources to decorate cookies for local food shelves. She made a few calls and was able to get 2,000 sugar cookies donated from one of our General Mills plants in Chanhassen, Minnesota. A committe was then formed to make a plan for decorating all of these cookies in our test kitchens by employees throughout our company as a team-building event. Here are just some of the very cute and festive cookies we decorated.
Seven stations were set up with cookies, holiday sprinkles and lots of tubes of Betty Crocker® cookie icing. We had plastic knifes for spreading the icing and toothpicks for making decorations at each station.
The committee set up four 1-hour shifts during one day and over 130 employees volunteered to help with this event. Here are some of them, piping on icing, pulling a toothpick through the icing for neat decorative effects and adding some sprinkles.
One plate of cookies, ready to go. Aren't they adorable?
More workers here, with more cookies to decorate. Notice we all wore hairnets and gloves to keep everything very sanitary.
And more really cute cookies to go.
What is James doing?
He made this penguin design on a cookie.
Even more volunteers here with lots more cookies to decorate. Everyone seemed to have fun decorating the cookies. Some of us even turned out to be more creative than we thought we were.
Reane collected the cookies and spread them out to dry. When the icing was dry, we packed resealable plastic bags with a dozen cookies each. A representative from the local food shelves stopped by the next morning at 9:00am to pick up the cookies.
At the end of the day, this is what we all felt!
