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Business & Tech

30 Incredible Cookie Designs from Lawrence Deans Bake Shop

From Star Wars to iPhones, you've never seen cookies like the ones from this Wilmette bakery.

What do scarecrows, iPhones, the Mona Lisa and the Millennium Falcon all have in common?

All these things and many more have been shrunk down into cookie form by Vicky Blanas, co-owner of Wilmette’s Lawrence Deans Bake Shop, 637 Green Bay Rd.

Vicky has run the bakery with her husband Lawrence Blanas (for whom the shop is named) since it opened in July 2011. Many of the confections to come out of the storefront are true collaborative efforts. He bakes, she decorates.

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Vicky said she started designing cookies as a way to relieve stress from her fulltime job as a high school teacher.

“We started in the Northfield farmers’ market about six years ago,” said Vicky, who lives in Wilmette with her husband, a native. “I was working fulltime at another job. [Designing cookies] was my stress reliever on Friday night. I would cut a batch of cookies and I would decorate, and I found that they would sell out every week. So that was the birth of it. It was a stress reliever, and it still is.”

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Today, the bakery turns out biscotti, cupcakes, cookies, muffins, cinnamon rolls, bread, seven different flavors of fudge, chocolate-dipped Oreos and more. Vicky said her husband’s background in construction has transferred well to the precision required in baking.

Some of the ideas for Vicky’s cookie designs come from customers. Others, she thinks up.

“It’s time consuming, but I love the challenge,” Vicky said. “Sometimes customers will come in and run ideas by me, and we’ll work together to come up with designs. Sometimes they’ll come in with strange requests. The Star Wars stuff came out of somebody had a Star Wars party, and I’m like, ‘Hey, let’s give it a shot.”

Vicky said both she and her husband love owning a small business in the Wilmette community and love the location of their shop.

“We’re just a small, family-run business,” Vicky said. “We like baking ourselves. We don’t like turning it over to someone else to bake for us. We’re more the bakers than the business people. That is where we find our pleasure, and we don’t want to lose that. So, we like to keep it small.”

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