St. Charles woman turns hobby into TV appearance on Food Network's 'Halloween Cookie Challenge'
Liz Suwanski isn't bothered that people are often reluctant to eat her cookies.
They have a good reason. It's not that they taste bad. It's that they look like yummy little pieces of art.
They look so good, in fact, that she'll soon appear on an episode of the Food Network's “Halloween Cookie Challenge.”
The St. Charles hobbyist baker, or cookier as she says they're called, will appear on the final episode of the season on Monday, Oct. 30.
“It was super exciting. It was super stressful. It was the most fun thing I've ever done,” she said.
Suwanski took up the hobby in 2014 after getting some elaborate cookies as a baby shower gift.
“I loved those cookies and I thought, 'I bet I could do that,'” she said. So for Christmas that year she baked cookies for gifts for her family, filled plastic baggies with frosting, cut a little tip out and set to decorating.
“They looked completely terrible,” she said.
A few years later and they're not terrible anymore. As she learned the craft, she also learned that she really didn't enjoy making the same cookie over and over.
“About three years ago I started making more complicated, intricate cookies,” she said. “Sometimes they're 3D, sometimes they have moving parts. I just like each cookie to be a unique experience so you're never going to see another one like it, because even I couldn't make it exactly the same.”
She can put hours into making one cookie. She estimates that a 3D haunted house cookie she recently made for her mom took her about 18 hours.
“Both my mother and my sister refuse to eat them,” she said. “I made a 3D tea box cookie for my mother-in-law and that's just going to die in her living room. I keep telling them 'please eat them,' but they all have little cookie graveyards of things I've made that they save.”
Suwanski doesn't sell her cookies, she just gives them away as gifts. And she swears they're meant to be eaten.
“I do try to make them taste good. I try to have interesting and unique flavors,” she said. “But the whole thing for me is just making something that's really cool that people can appreciate and are excited to receive.”
Suwanski's Instagram account, the_pumpkinmooncookies, where she describes herself as a “baker of the (un)necessarily overcomplicated,” drew the eyes of producers for the company that makes Halloween and Christmas cookie shows for the Food Network. The six-episode season features a different winner each week, chosen by judges Duff Goldman and Rosanna Pansino. Four contestants start in round one, where one is eliminated. The final three then compete for a $10,000 prize.
The second-to-last episode will air at 9 p.m. Monday, and Suwanski will be featured the week after. The show can be streamed on Discovery+ and Max.
She said making cookies at home and on TV are two entirely different endeavors.
“It was really fun, but it was really hard,” she said. “I love making cookies, but I do them in my own time, when I want to do them and I can take as long as I want.”
She said no matter how talented you are, the limited amount is the great equalizer among contestants.
“You could be amazing on Instagram and have no luck at all in that kitchen just because you have way less time than you're used to,” she said.
Suwanski said it was inspiring to see the cookies being made by the contestants all season.
“We're all on the show for a reason, but some of the stuff people were able to come up with and put out in that amount of time was just mind-blowing,” she said. “Even though I was there, I still can't believe that anyone can do that amount of work in that short period of time.”
While it was stressful, she had the benefit of doing it with others who share her passion.
“Meeting other cookiers was amazing,” she said. “One of my favorite things about being on the show was actually the other people.”
Many of them knew each other from what they've dubbed “Cookieland,” a corner of Instagram were thousands of cookiers show their work and share tips and encouragement. One of the contestants on her episode, Melinda Fuller, is an online friend from Morton, Illinois.
“Having this shared experience with them was just the icing on the cookie,” she said.
While she never dreamed her hobby would land her on TV, she hopes it's not the last time.
“This was like my main character moment. I feel really proud that Food Network even considered me for the show, no matter what happened,” she said. “I would say it's a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but hopefully it's not. Hopefully I get to go again.”