Before they make it out the door, laden carefully with royal icing and tucked neatly into tidy bakery boxes, cookie chef Velma Perez double checks that each piece has its own creative flair. Every cookie is a tiny canvas filled with meticulous sugary detail. Each is its own artwork containing just a tiny bit of her heart.
“I pride myself as a cottage bakery on the detail, because it’s not something that you can push through a machine,” Velma says. “You’re picking up a piece of my heart and taking it with you.”
Velma, who owns CookieGram in Cypress, bakes and decorates homemade novelty cookies from scratch. Speaking from her “cookie studio,” she tells of how she got started in the novelty cookie business and how she ended up on the Food Network.
“I couldn’t ask for a better gig,” she says, in between customer visits.
Velma’s cookie studio is packed with hundreds of cookie cutters in every conceivable shape and style. Turkeys for Thanksgiving, skulls for Day of the Dead, mermaids for birthdays and the infamous 2020 toilet paper roll. Cookie racks, an airbrush machine and a cookie projector are the tools of her trade.
But the most important ingredient for her cookies, however, is communication. Long before she even mixes her dough, Velma chats with her clients, pressing them for details, to ensure her cookie art will capture the essence of their celebration. She sends them a snapshot while decorating and carefully places each treat in a box with a matching ribbon.
“My job is to take what they’re giving me and help them turn it into a grand experience,” she says. “The love goes into the details.”
And when it comes to decorating details, it seems limitless what Velma creates. She can write custom messages on her cookies or hand-paint a design so intricate it looks like a tiny water-color art piece. One of her most notable works is a portrait of a war memorial cemetery with an unfurled American flag.
Velma, a completely self-taught cookie artist, never trained professionally as a baker or businesswoman. She started off in 2017 with a $6 mixer and a prayer. Lots of prayers in fact. Money was tight at the time and Velma sought help from a higher power.
“I spent an evening just dedicated in prayer asking God for direction,” she said. Back then, Velma only made custom cookies as a hobby, but one day randomly decided to buy beach-themed cookie cutters. She spent $18 dollars - an exorbitant amount at the time - but within moments, she got a call from a friend who wanted dozens of beach-themed cookies.
“I just kind of took that as an answer to my prayer,” Velma says.
A year later she received another call - this time it was someone from casting at the Food Network. They wanted her to compete in a seasonal special called the “Christmas Cookie Challenge.” After rounds of interviews, producers chose Velma from more than 10,000 applicants to compete on the show. Her first challenge was to create a Christmas cookie character and scene using only one cookie cutter. With a bell-shaped cookie cutter, she made a Christmas-hat-wearing lady and small living room while the cameras rolled and judges tested her designs. But her work fell short and she was eliminated in the first round, and although Velma did not win, her experience taught her how to dig deep.
“You just don’t know what your potential is until you’re right in the mix of it,” she said.
It’s Velma’s creativity and thoughtfulness that customers say sets her apart from other cookie designers. She is constantly updating her seasonal designs and changes her business strategy to fit the times. Once during last year’s quarantine, she dressed up in an inflatable dinosaur costume to make cookie deliveries. And at Christmastime, she offered DIY kits for cookie newbies who want to try their hand at decorating.
“She’s never going to give you something she hasn’t poured her heart and soul into,” says Kendall Bell, who’s ordered Velma’s cookies for family birthdays and special events. Velma takes a client’s vague idea and creates a masterpiece, Kendall says.
“Even when I can’t always put it into words what I want...she can execute it tenfold,” says Ginnean Cleveland, a longtime customer who drives from Pearland to Cypress just for Velma’s cookies. “There’s no substitute for the level of intentionally.”