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Cookie Trivia: Fun Facts about Eating and Baking Cookies

Have fun! Enjoy these bits of cookie trivia and facts about baking cookies. You’ll even find out cookie superlatives to impress your friends and some entertaining trivia to know when you’re shopping for store-bought cookies.

Cookie Trivia: Eating and Baking Cookies

• Americans consume over 2 billion cookies a year … about 300 cookies for each person.
  
  
• The average American eats 35,000 cookies in a lifetime.
  
  
• 95.2 percent of U.S. households consume cookies.
  
  
• Half the cookies baked in American homes each year are chocolate chip.
  
  
• Baking burns 168 – 348 calories an hour, (according the Livestrong Foundation and My Fitness Pal.)
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• Santa Claus eats an estimated 336,150,386 cookies on Christmas Eve.

Cookie Trivia: Cookie Superlatives

• Biggest cookie: The biggest recorded cookie was baked on May 17, 2003 in Flat Rock, NC by Immaculate Baking Company. It clocked in at 102 feet wide and weighed over 40,000 pounds.
  
  
• Tallest cookie tower: The tallest tower of cookies measured 1.83 meters tall (6 ft 1/8 inches) and was constructed by the Girl Scouts of Nassau County on January 9, 2010 at the Roosevelt Field Mall in Garden City, New York. Sixty Girl Scouts used 22,800 cookies to build the tower.
  
  
• Most cookies baked: Hassett’s Bakery (Cork, Ireland) holds the world record for the most cookies baked in one hour: 4,695.

Trivia about Commercial Cookies (A.K.A “Store-Bought Cookies”)

• Animal Crackers, introduced by Nabisco in 1902, were the first commercial cookie to be massed-produced in the U.S.
  
  
• 54 different animals have been represented in Animal Crackers.
  
  
• The Oreo was the best-selling cookie of the 20th century. Americans spend $550 million on Oreos each year.
  
  
• Little Debbie cookies, produced by McKee Foods, were branded in the 1960s after owners O.D. and Ruth McKee’s granddaughter, Debbie, then four years old.
  
  
• Girl Scouts sell 200 million boxes of cookies a year.

Trivia about Cookie Cutters

• Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) is credited with overseeing the first biscuits cut into the shape of men from ginger dough, the precursor to today’s gingerbread men.
  
  
• Early American tinsmiths first made cookie cutters by hand in the 1700s.
  
  
• The Cookie Cutters Collectors Club, a nonprofit organization, was founded in 1972 as a way for aficionados to collect and use cookie cutters.
  
  
• The American National Cookie Cutter Historical Museum is housed in the Joplin Museum Complex in Joplin, Missouri.
  
  
• National Cookie Cutter Week is celebrated each year during the first full week in December.

Trivia about Cookie Jars

• American cookie jars, descendents of British biscuit jars, were born out of need. They first appeared in the 1930s as Depression housewives slowly abandoned buying bakery-made foods, baking at home instead to save money.  
  
  
• The largest collection of cookie jars numbers at 2,653 and belongs to Edith Eva Fuchs, a resident of Metamora, Indiana (USA).

Official Cookies

• New Mexico named the bizcochito (biz-koh’-shee-toh)  its official state cookie in 1989, making the state the first to adopt an official cookie. Bizcochito, derived from the Spanish word bizcocho (which means biscuit), is a shortbread cookie flavored with anise and topped with cinnamon sugar.
  
  
• Massachusetts adopted the chocolate chip cookie as its official state cookie in 1997. Chocolate chip cookies were invented in 1930 at the Toll House Restaurant in Whitman, MA.
  
  
• Legislation in Pennsylvania to designate an official state cookie as been held up for several years as state lawmakers struggle to chose between the Nazareth Sugar Cookie and the Chocolate Chip Cookie. 
  
  
• In 2004 a bill was introduced to the Michigan state legislature by a group of fourth graders, requesting that Michigan Treasure Cookie be adopted as the official state cookie.

Unusual Cookies

Unagi Pie, a specialty of Hamamatsu, Japan, are cookies made with fresh butter, crushed eel bones, eel extract, and garlic.

More Fun Cookie Trivia from The Elf

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