Owing to “A Visit from St. Nicholas” — the widely read Christmas classic by Clement Clark Moore — many Americans have heard of a sugar plum, but never tasted one. But almost everyone knows the sweet-spot glucose spike of a frosted sugar cookie.

In today’s specialized culinary market, these are not your grandmother’s sugar cookies. Like cakes shaped and iced to delight the eyes along with the taste buds, like pies with pastry dough sculpted into impossibly complex patterns and designs — the nostalgic frosted sugar cookie now could be considered a folk art form. The frosted sugar cookie is a quintessential Christmas cookie, and the shortbread cookie akin to a canvas with icing the paint.

Andrea Goossens, founder of Sugar Bloom Studios Cookies and Art in Westminster, Colo., is one smart cookie. She fills local custom orders, but also ships her artful confections to celebrities: actors and entertainers, fashion models and Olympians. Her exquisite cookie designs have landed in the likes of Vogue and Forbes magazines.

A self-taught baker, Goossens’ big claim to fame was her victory on the Food Network’s Christmas Cookie Challenge in Season 4, Episode 1, in December of 2020. She wound up on the show when a producer saw her Instagram page and contacted her to compete in the Christmas Cookie Challenge, a reality TV program.

“I was so nervous,” Goossens said. “I was only about five months into it and had about 50 Instagram followers. I said, ‘This isn’t even what I do.’ But I went with the right attitude, and I won!”

Having earned her architecture and design degree at University of Colorado Boulder, Goossens’ education gave her a competitive edge on the show when the challenges to contestants included creating a puzzle cookie in one hour. Her gingerbread man bathing in a mug of hot chocolate design advanced her to the finals. She was tasked with making a nutcracker-themed cookie standing 10 inches or taller in two hours. Goossens, who immigrated from Belize, designed and decorated a King of the Sea nutcracker cookie in homage to her beachy motherland. When her nutcracker cracked on-camera, of course she could have said: “That’s the way the cookie crumbles.”

Instead, Goossens determinedly forged the broken cookie pieces together with frosting and bolstered her merman nutcracker so he stood. And won. The prize was $10,000. The bigger reward was the affirmation of her talents which Goossens used as a springboard for her cookie company.

Goossens’ cookie journey began during the pandemic lockdown.

“I was baking at home and found it to be a very useful and beneficial time because my kids love to bake, decorate and eat cookies. I was teaching myself a skill and spending time with my kids” she said.

“I couldn’t get enough. I spent hours every day trying to teach myself more. I was sampling watercolors on icing, working with textures. I was looking at sculptures and art as inspiration and recreating art in cookie form.”

The pandemic lockdown helped Goossens move from a half-baked idea to a flourishing small business.

“Everybody was at home looking at Instagram,” she said.

In 2020, when many businesses flopped, Sugar Bloom Studios rose.

“The reason why we saw such success is that sugar cookies can be heat-sealed [in plastic wrappers] for longevity of shelf life. It traps moisture in ,so they remain tasting so fresh. And sugar cookies can be shipped,” said Goossens.

Sugar Bloom ships cookies in charming packaging: a colorful box with stickers on the outside and festive shredded paper on the inside to cushion cookies.

“What differentiates us from the rest is the heart behind it,” she said. “We care so much about the tiny details. We’ll embody meaning in our cookies so that when people see their order they know, ‘We see you. We celebrate you.’”

In December, Sugar Bloom is bursting with holiday-themed cookies. For Christmas, they teach a class in Grinch and Charlie Brown cookies. They create cookies resembling sweaters, snowflakes and ice skates. They design and decorate Hanukkah cookies as dreidels or deer with antlers forming a menorah. For New Year’s Eve, cocktail-shaped cookies are popular.

Throughout the year Sugar Bloom makes cookies that resemble customers’ houses, cookies with pet portraits, cookies for gender reveals. The wedding set includes cookies shaped like the bride’s ring, gown and shoes, the venue and the getaway car.

“At the end of the day this is art. These are labor-intensive cookies,” Goossens said. “Making cookies for the gender reveal of somebody who’s been on an IVF journey is a teary-eyed, emotional experience. The heart is everything that drives it.”

At Sugar Bloom Studios, frosting is the paint, and the bakers are artists.

“I tried the culinary background route, but it was not a good fit to have experienced bakers or decorators come with restrictions their school taught them,” Goossens said. “We as artists are rule-breakers, and we think outside of culinary standards. Artists are a good fit here. We want to see imagination break the cookie mold. That’s how we create art.”

Sugar Bloom cookies range from Tier 1 to Tier 6, with the top end often including 20 colors of icing and painstaking details. Customers often claim the artful cookies are too beautiful to eat, so Sugar Bloom offers kits with epoxy resin to preserve the custom creations.

“When we do the grueling, exhaustive cookies, we send a box of ‘Eat Me’ cookies inspired by Alice in Wonderland,” said Goossens.

At Sugar Bloom Studios one of the key ingredients is compassion. Goossens perfected tasty gluten-free sugar cookies and also sugar cookies for vegans.

“I’m the foodie who cares about flavor,” she said.

“We care about inclusivity,” she said. “Some Indian customers asked us about Diwali cookies, and we want to do cookies for everybody.”

Goossen’s gold-standard sugar cookie is almond-vanilla bean, but her bakery also turns out flavor variations: gingerbread for Christmas, snickerdoodle, butter pecan, orange zest-vanilla bean, cookies and cream, lemon zest for summer and Dutch chocolate cookies.

“Our flagship store in Westminster is the studio where we create, decorate and celebrate,” she said. “We are not your average bakery. There’s no grab and go.”

Goossens admits learning curves in matters ranging from high-altitude recipes adjustments to changes in the water content of U.S.-produced butter, but she hasn’t let setbacks result in burnout. Though her custom cookie business flourished, Sugar Bloom’s future focus is on cookie decorating classes.

“We’re at the three-year mark this month, and our vision for this studio is to teach classes and workshops. We have everything you need, and we make the mess for you. We provide pre-baked cookies, designs, stencils and imprints. People are learning new techniques, but having a good time,” Goossens said.

The appeal of sugar cookies seems almost universal, according to Goossens.

“I’m looking for a male lead instructor for next year,” she said. “All are welcome. This is a safe space. We have 5-year-olds and 90-year-olds in the same class.”

Along with group classes, Sugar Bloom Studios offers 1:1 classes for professionals.

“We have seen so many people who hated their job make a career pivot, and stay-at-home moms find a side gig. It’s a movement,” Goossens said. “Sugar cookies are classic and they’re not going anywhere. There are enough opportunities for everyone to succeed.”

The icing on top of her brand is a devotion to community values. The Sugar Bloom Studios website proclaims: “Food is a universal force that brings all of us together.” Sugar Bloom Studios generously sweetens the scene with donations of cookies to schools, soup kitchens and nonprofits. Goossens gives discounts to teachers and nurses.

Alex Peterson, interim chief of staff at the Butterfly Pavilion in Westminster, praised a contribution of cookies for the nonprofit’s fundraiser.

“Sugar Bloom Cookies donated the most fun cookies for Butterfly Pavilion’s 2025 Butterfly Ball Colorado’s Silent Auction, complete with not only a beautiful set of decorated cookies that took my breath away, but also two sets to decorate including octopi, tarantulas and Monarch butterflies,” Peterson said.

Goossens’ favorite charity is Colorado Springs-based OneChild — “a global community of Child Champions that serves children in poverty so they can discover hope and reach their God-given potential.”

Goossens said: “We don’t talk much about the ways we give back because I don’t want to sound arrogant or prideful. We’re using cookies to help raise money and awareness. At Sugar Bloom Cookies we care about making a difference. We are small, but we’re trying to make a big impact.”

And that, evidently, is a recipe for success.