East Butler baker makes cookies for charity, family, friends only
Everyone contributes to society in their own way, but Carol Sexton has the sweetest way to help those in need.
Sexton, of East Butler, has baked mountains of cookies over the years for charitable events, including Bundle Up Butler and Twilight Wish.
The biggest event she bakes for is the annual Butler County Historical Society Cookie Walk, which is slated for Saturday, Dec. 2, at the Sen. Walter Lowrie House on Diamond Street.
There, cookie lovers pay $12 for up to three empty bakery boxes, which they fill with cookies laid out throughout the historic house.
Live Christmas music and Victorian holiday decorations throughout the museum greet those purchasing cookies at the Cookie Walk.
The popular Cookie Walk is one of the historical society’s biggest annual fundraisers, said Jennifer Ford, executive director.
Sexton is a huge contributor to the event each year, and will have made 70 dozen cookies for this year’s Cookie Walk. That’s 840 cookies of many varieties.
“I really like the historical society,” Sexton said of her reason for baking so many cookies for the Cookie Walk. “As a (amateur) genealogist, I’ve been tracing my family history for years.”
She said anyone who enjoys history should help out however they can at the historical society.
“The historical society has been a great source of help and they need help, too,” Sexton said. “They need more volunteers.”
Some of the cookies Sexton bakes for the Cookie Walk are rocky road fudge bars, ginger cookies dipped in white chocolate, snickerdoodles, salty sweets, pecan bars, peanut butter cup and peanut butter kisses.
“The most popular cookie I get asked for all the time are the rocky road fudge bars,” Sexton said. “It’s a Pillsbury recipe.”
She heard through the cookie-baking grapevine that the rocky roads were snapped up quickly at the 2022 Cookie Walk.
The cookie her daughter requests is the ginger cookie dipped in white chocolate.
Sexton favors the two types of biscotti she makes, which are cranberry pistachio and triple ginger.
She explained the biscotti are created by making a loaf and slicing it into strips, which are baked twice to achieve the traditional crunchy biscotti consistency.
The most time-consuming recipe she follows each Christmastime is the one for sweet and salty butter pecan cookies, which must be mixed up and refrigerated to ensure all the ingredients’ flavors blend before they are baked.
“They are absolutely delicious,” Sexton said.
She doesn’t do a lot of decorated sugar cookies, which might surprise some.
“For my family this year, I want to do a sugar cookie Christmas tree,” Sexton said.
Other cookies that are very popular are the caramel tassies, which have a hard sauce on top.
“Transporting them is a pain,” she said. “You can’t stack them with the hard sauce.”
One familiar confection that she has made many times is the dainty lady lock, a delicate curled cookie that is filled with cream and dusted with powdered sugar.
“Lady locks usually go really fast,” Sexton said. “That’s a tradition on the Pittsburgh cookie table.”
A pecan bar in Sexton’s repertoire calls for the nuts to be toasted in butter in a skillet, then the butter is strained off and chilled to be used in the recipe.
Sexton uses recipes she finds in various places, not her own recipes as some bakers do.
“I think I’m pretty good at recognizing whether a recipe is going to work just by reading it,” she said.
A new recipe Sexton tried this year is an eggnog kringle.
“It looks like a pretzel and there’s eggnog in the dough,” she said. “The icing also has eggnog.”
Once recipe Sexton will not try is a European cookie that calls for powdered ammonia.
“There are no weird ingredients in my cookies,” she said.
Sexton uses only high-quality ingredients in her cookies, like real vanilla and butter.
She uses only King Arthur flour, which she buys in 10-pound bags.
Sexton also uses parchment paper on her cookie sheets to avoid the need to wash the pans while baking.
While many cooks and bakers use parchment today, Sexton learned the trick many years ago, before parchment was readily available for home use.
“I worked at Kroger years ago, and I always hung around the bakery although it wasn’t my department, and they used parchment,” she said.
Sexton has advice for novice bakers if they wish to successfully whip up several dozen cookies.
“Mix one day and bake the next, because it’s too easy to make mistakes if the oven’s on and you’re mixing cookie batter,” she said.
Sexton owns a one horsepower KitchenAid mixer that replaced her former KitchenAid, which she gave to her daughter.
The larger version she now uses is more efficient for her purposes.
“I can do 14 cups of batter at a time,” Sexton said.
While she loves baking, Sexton, who is retired from Cleveland-Cliffs, does not bake cookies as a side job like some baking enthusiasts.
“My skills are limited. I’m not a techie person,” Sexton said. “I worked in a mill, so one of the things I can do is bake.”
She finds the hobby relaxing and enjoyable.
“It’s a Zen thing,” Sexton said.
She remains on the hunt for the perfect chocolate chip cookie, even after years of baking cookies.
“Each one that comes along, it seems like there’s one little tweak,” Sexton said. “I don’t think there’s a bad chocolate chip cookie.”
She does not partake of her tempting results while baking Christmas cookies.
“But if there are cookies in the freezer, all bets are off,” Sexton said.
Once completed and cooled, Sexton places her cookies in half-sheet aluminum pans she buys in bulk.
Wax paper or parchment paper are placed between the layers to protect them while she drives them to their destination.
Sexton and two friends have breakfast Saturday morning on the day of the Cookie Walk, then deliver the cookies to the Lowrie House.
“But we don’t help set them out because we’re ‘cookied’ out,” she said.
Sexton plans to continue making cookies for charities, friends and family for as long as she is able, but will never do it for income.
“It’s just not in me,” she said. “It takes a lot more time and I have other things to do.”
Asked how much she spends on cookie ingredients and aluminum foil pans for transportation each year, Sexton answers “I don’t want to know.”
