By
- John Mullen for AL.com
Partners Brittney Hatcher and Hugh Harmon knew making cookies and royal icing from scratch would be fun even before they started the Blue Crab Cookie Lab
“Back in February, I kind of was like looking into cookies,” Brittney said. “There’s all these party themes and I was trying to think of getting into something geared towards party planning. Then I took a cookie class and he came with me.”
First, they signed up for a series of classes on cookies. Soon the pair carved out a corner in the stylish kitchen of Hugh’s Fort Morgan home to put a new cookie printer on a commercial kitchen table with a shelf above stocked with all manner of colorings to make all manner of cookies
“This is called the Eddie printer,” Hugh said. “It’s the only food-safe printer that you can buy. And we can, with the programs that we use, put any image you could ever think of on a cookie. If you can scan it in, you can make it up.”
That was fun. And neat
“If you’re doing circle cookies, you can do 12 cookies at a time,” Hugh said. “It’ll do 12 cookies in two minutes of the same image.”
The pair can take any digital image and decorate it with business logos, personal photos, super heroes – just about anything you can imagine
Even any shape. An image of say, a crab, can be downloaded into a computer file which can be sent to a 3D printer in a spare bedroom and it makes a crab cookie cutter. Whatever the shape, they can make it into a cookie
A long-time friend came to visit and was greeted with cookies showing her kids as Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story and famous soccer star Rinaldo Toy Story
But just a few months into all that fun, while remaining fun, has the pair has also turned out dozens of cookies at a time as word gets out about the vast array they can come up with
“Our first month, we did, how many dozen, 54 dozen?” Brittney said. “We actually had a corporate order for 17 dozen.”
That order came about out of a dinner party where the topic turned to cookies
“A friend of ours, my brother-in-law’s best friend, lives in Gulf Shores and he was having dinner with his buddy,” Hugh said. “His buddy is one of the big guys at FedEx Freight in Mobile. My buddy was telling him, our friends are making these cookies. They’re badass. I don’t know if his friend got to taste one or what. but next thing we know, we get a 17-dozen order.”
The Fed-Ex cookies were a big hit and another hit was cookies of the shoulder patches for Gulf Shores Police. The orders keep coming and has yet to start ebbing
“It’s just blowing up, and it’s people we don’t know that are contacting us,” Brittney said. “Like, people from Oklahoma and Kansas, and they’re coming here for vacation and somehow they see us online.”
Besides printed images, the pair also handcraft special orders designed like rattles or bottles for baby showers, one customer wanted a 1970s era Ford Bronco, another a Jameson bottle with his name on it. She did miniature wedding dresses and had the coat hangers and rack made with the 3D printer
“I got to put some bows on ‘em,” Brittney said. “I’m scared to do that. But if you mess up, you scrape it off and start over. It’s really time consuming though.”
This isn’t the first time the pair has started an on-the-side business. A few years ago they collected driftwood, made little Christmas trees for sale and took a cruise on the proceeds. They have higher hopes for this venture
“Yeah, it may turn into a little more than that,” Brittney said of Blue Crab Cookie Lab. She’s been bartending on the Gulf Coast for about 20 years or so and it thinking it might be time to take a break from that grind. Hugh is retired from the Army but likes keeping busy
“I have anxiety, PTSD, and I was in the Army for a long time,” Hugh said. “And when I sit down and have to put that icing on those cookies, I have to really concentrate. It occupies my brain, it’s really good for me in that sense.”
As the cookie orders keep coming, Brittney and Hugh are already looking for the next addition to the cookie fare: Coming soon: lemon sugar cookies with lemon in the cookie and the icing. With your favorite image, of course
