Jasmine Cho often wondered why the contributions of Asian Americans were missing in her school history books when she was growing up in Los Angeles and Albuquerque.
“I struggled with a feeling of irrelevance and a lack of belonging because I never saw faces that looked like mine or stories that resembled my family’s story in the school curriculum,” said Cho, noting that her parents had immigrated from South Korea, and she was often the only Korean American child in her community.
“All of this made me ask myself, ‘What is my place here in this country?’” she said.
Cho, now 39 and an online bakery owner in Pittsburgh, began to work through this question in a unique way: by making cookie art.
In 2016, she decorated a batch of sugar cookies in the likeness of a friend for a birthday party, and she was soon overwhelmed with requests at her Yummyholic online bakery from others who wanted their own cookie portraits.
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“They drew so much attention that I felt like I should give them something more to pay attention to,” Cho said. “That’s when I had my first ‘aha’ moment.”
Cho decided she would create a mini gallery of cookie portraits dedicated to Asian Americans and display them at a local festival, she said.
“To me, they were edible blank canvases,” she said in a TEDx talk called “How I use cookies to teach history."
Her historical cookies include portraits of Afong Moy, who in 1834 was the first Chinese woman known to visit America, and subsequently became a one-person traveling sideshow. Also Takao Ozawa, who was born in Japan and lived in the United States for 20 years. He petitioned the Supreme Court to become a U.S. citizen, but was rejected in 1922 because he was not Caucasian.
Among the first likenesses Cho preserved in royal icing were former Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Hines Ward and actress Ming-Na Wen, the voice of “Mulan” and one of the stars of “The Joy Luck Club.”
Since then, she has created several hundred cookie portraits featuring notable Pittsburgh locals such as Leah Lizarondo, the founder of a nonprofit working to eliminate food waste in the city, and national celebrities such as actors Ke Huy Quan, George Takei and Tamlyn Tomita, who started her career with “The Karate Kid Part II.”
Cho’s cookie portraits of famous Asian Americans are not for sale, though many of them have been on exhibit around Pittsburgh, including at the City-County Building, the Heinz History Center, and at several schools and coffee shops, she said.
Cho has also painted cookies to honor deceased Asian Americans, including Olympic gold medal diver Sammy Lee, author and civil rights activist Grace Lee Boggs and Yuji Ichioka, a Japanese American historian who is credited with coining the term “Asian American.”
She said she heard from many people who were touched when she painted a cookie in remembrance of Betty Ong, an American Airlines flight attendant who acted with courage as terrorists flew toward the World Trade Center on 9/11.
“Her niece reached out to me and thanked me for doing the portrait,” Cho said, noting that she tries to mail her cookie art to subjects or their families whenever possible.
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“I love that I’m able to draw people to their stories through a humble cookie,” she said. “It’s a powerful healing and celebratory way to bring people together.”
Tomita said she was stunned and delighted to learn that Cho had spent more than six hours painstakingly detailing her image onto a small batch of vanilla sugar cookies. Cho sent them to her about three years ago after she painted a series of cookies to commemorate the PBS documentary series “Asian Americans.”
“I got into a heated discussion about eating them or not,” Tomita said. “Now they’re in my freezer waiting to become Christmas cookie ornament decorations.”
Tomita said Cho’s cookies began to spark conversations about Asian Americans’ and Pacific Islanders’ experiences with race and social justice in America. Cho’s art focuses on Asian Americans, but she has also painted cookies of other influential people of color.
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In 2021, the online education platform Newsela included photos of some of her cookies in a lesson plan, prompting young people to reach out to Cho.
“I started receiving DMs that I initially thought were spam, but discovered they were messages from middle school students who told me they were learning about me and my cookies,” Cho said.
Tomita said she’s impressed with how Cho merges her passion for baking with activism.
“She and her work are full of energy, fun and information that can literally be eaten and digested in a sweet confection,” she said. “I’m stoked that I was selected — I’m a huge fan of all of Jasmine’s cookie people.”
While many bakers call themselves cookie artists, Cho said she prefers to be known as a cookie activist.
With hate crimes against Asian Americans on the rise, Cho said she felt compelled to raise awareness. She gives frequent virtual and in-person speeches at schools and universities about the importance of Asian American history, and she holds cookie-decorating workshops around Pittsburgh to spur conversation, she said.
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In 2019, she wrote and illustrated a children’s book, “Role Models Who Look Like Me: Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders Who Made History.”
“My cookie faces are the faces of people I wish I’d been able to learn more about when I was younger,” she said.
Her process to create each cookie is simple, but time-consuming, she said. First, she cuts out the images with an X-Acto knife and bakes the sugar cookies using a recipe she adapted from two others she found in cookbooks years ago.
Cho then puts down thin layers of icing for the skin and hair and uses projection technology to guide her as she traces images of faces onto the cookies with a fine tip paint brush and food coloring. She then brushes on the final details with royal icing.
“Each one takes an average of four to six hours to finish,” she said. “Good cookie art takes a lot of patience.”
Although most of her creations are vanilla-flavored, she said she hopes to experiment with new flavors as more faces are added to her cookie gallery. She also plans to decorate some edible buildings.
“Right now, I’m working on a gingerbread reconstruction of the Chinatown Inn in Pittsburgh for a community event,” Cho said, referring to a restaurant that has operated for three generations and is the only remnant of her city’s Chinatown.
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“I’m going to leave the side walls bare for people at the event to add their own [tiny] edible murals,” she said, explaining that the reconstruction will measure about a foot tall.
After that, she said she has plans to expand her cookie activism.
“I love the idea of making different Chinatowns around the country in cookie form,” Cho said. “I can’t think of a more perfect way to keep the conversation going and intersect my passion for social justice and my love for baking.”
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