Articles

Sweet Revenge
Hilary's Cookies: A Love Triangle
by Wendy Navratil
Chicago Tribune, Sunday August 17, 2003

When the relationship was all done except for the crumbs, the ex-boyfriend would come back begging for more.

“I had this ugly breakup and the guy kept calling me,” Hilary Black, 35 says. “It wasn’t just ‘please take me back’. It was ‘I really miss your cookies.’ I have guys talk about the cookies from 10 years ago.

Who could blame them? They would be hard-pressed to find cookies that compare elsewhere—banana bread, apple pie, chocolate almond cherry, peanut butter and jelly, and hot buttered rum at the holidays—all from Black’s recipes.

In college, Black would make chocolate chip cookies to “impress guys,” she admits. She grew bored and strayed. Experimenting with ingredients, she came up with creations such as oatmeal apple raisin, pumpkin pie and chocolate caramel coffee. For iced sugar cookies, she flavored the dough with vanilla bean or lemon, “because sugar cookies are usually good-looking but gross,” she said.

Tasters would be moved to profanity-laced exclamations–which now grace some of her business cards. She had them printed last year, after an exasperated friend told her, “You’re giving your talents away to the wrong people!”

That brings us to this summer. Black has been two-timing, so to speak, juggling orders for Hilary’s Cookies, sold at street fairs, with her work as a home decorative artist.

News that she has made a business of baking has drawn some love-for-sale indignation from a former boyriend/beneficiary or two.

“It’s like I’m cheating on these guys,” she said. “They never completely appreciated them until I was gone.”