'A story in cookies': Colorado artist finds success in creating beautiful treats

Andrea Goossens is an artist. Her medium: cookies.

The self-taught Westminster cookie artist has grown her craft from pandemic hobby to a thriving bakery business, Sugar Bloom Cookie and Studios. Goossens’ intricately painted sugar cookies are now a staple among celebrity parties and premieres, with each treat hand-painted with meticulous detail, Goossen said.

It started in 2020, when Goossens was looking for something to do with her kids during the pandemic while stuck at home.

“I needed something to occupy them and so I thought, what better time than to teach myself how to make sugar cookies, which is something I had always admired,” she said. “I had tried once before, I think two years before the pandemic, and it just went so poorly.”

Soon, Goossens found herself baking and designing cookies anytime she could.

“We started making cookies together with the kiddos,” she said. “When I would put them down to sleep, I felt like I just couldn’t put it down. It was one of those hobbies that you just want to continue doing over and over again.”

Teaching herself with hours of videos and practice, she continued to get better and better, Goossens said. Encouraged by her family, Goossens started an Instagram account to share her cookie-based artwork, which became popular.

“I quickly came up with this Sugar Bloom name on the fly — thank God the handle was available,” Goossens said jokingly. “I didn’t put much thought into it as a business ever. I just was like, ‘This is a hobby. People want to see what I’m doing. We’re stuck at home. Let’s start this.’”

Shortly after creating the account, however, Goossens was contacted by a Food Network casting director who asked Goossens to compete on season four of the “Christmas Cookie Challenge.”

“I was just floored because I did not expect that to happen,” she said. “When I flew out there, I didn’t even have my recipe memorized. I was just so unprepared. But I just said, ‘This is an opportunity. This is like the biggest opportunity that I’ve probably ever received.’”

Although she felt underprepared — competing against baking experts with years of experience — Goossens won. Her story erupted, with features in Vogue, The Knot and Insider.

“I was the underdog completely,” she said. “I flew back home, and I was just shocked. I had to keep the secret for months before it aired. And the next big question was what next?”

Torn between her graphic design career and her new-found passion, Goossens weighed her options.

“I had this big question mark in my head because I studied architecture and design at CU Boulder, and I love design. That’s what I live for,” she said. “I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, and so I sat on it for a long time.”

That was until Goossens got a call from a celebrity event planner, who asked if the artist could provide cookies for Kourtney Kardashian’s Christmas Eve party.

“All these opportunities came knocking at my door,” she said.

“I had to make quick decisions on where I wanted to take the company, because now I had to turn it into a company like overnight.”

Goossens’ cookies are popular not just because of the detailed artistry, but also because the cookies taste good. When competing in the “Christmas Cookie Challenge,” her cookies won based on skill of decorating and the flavor execution.

“The cookies are very beautiful, but they’re also very tasty. Sometimes people just order them plain just to snack on the cookies themselves,” she said.

As far as creating designs, Goossens gets inspired by the world around her, from nature to traveling. She also has fun incorporating some pop-culture trends into her designs, like “Barbie.”

“I’m constantly designing on my iPad, just drawing left and right, different patterns that I saw, different techniques that I saw, even if it was a knitted or weaved pattern, I’m going to try to replicate it in a cookie form,” she said. “For me, I’m using nature, I’m using culture, I’m using all the things to bring it back to tell a story in cookies.”

Goossens opened her first brick-and-mortar store, Sugar Bloom Studios, in 2022. There, she teaches cookie decorating workshops, which have different themes throughout the month. She also rents out to studio to host private parties.

“I’m taking elements from pottery and picking out elements from painting and I’m combining it into a new form, which happens to work out,” she said. “Most of the techniques I’m teaching myself or I’m taking classes from other people and combining them and tweaking them.”

Sugar Bloom does do a pop-up bakery once a month, where it sells gourmet cookies with fun flavors, like spicy mango margarita.

“It’s not your typical bakery. You cannot come in and buy something on demand. It’s a very curated experience,” she said.

With her quick success, Goossens has had to learn how to keep herself from biting off more than she could chew, which has been a difficult lesson.

“It’s been hard to control the growth; the last thing I want to do is grow too fast,” she said. “The hardest thing I’ve had to learn is to say no.”

Overall, though, Goossens hopes her story inspires others to pursue their dream and express themselves.

“I just always want to be a very humble person about my experience, but also I want to give back in any way that I can, because I think that a lot of people feel stuck, and they feel like maybe this is impossible for them, but I’m here to prove that it isn’t,” she said.