Their origin is a century-old mystery, but these delectable cookies are Middle GA jewels
Editor’s note: This article is part of an occasional series — “Middle Georgia Delicacies” — bite-size homages to fine food offerings, from the unsung to the iconic, at eateries across our region.
The flower cookies at Wilson’s Bakery in Warner Robins are a confection of the gods.
They are tender as rose petals, delicate as petits fours, sweeter than jelly biscuits.
Round as plump silver dollars with pea-size holes dotting their centers, they are pillowy canvases of soft-baked art.
Squirts of icing — neon dollops for blooms and green swooshes for leaves — serve as splashes of understated simplicity on cookies almost too elegant to eat.
Their creator, or at least their local originator, Isak Nygaard, became a master baker as a teen in his native Norway in the 1920s.
He moved to the U.S., where he worked at Larsen’s Bakery in New York City before being drafted during World War II. He landed at Normandy and served in the 774 Tank Destroyer Battalion. He settled in Warner Robins and, in the mid-1950s, opened Nygaard’s Bakery.
The flower cookie recipe he perfected lives on at what is now Wilson’s Bakery, which Nygaard’s became after Nygaard sold the business about 40 years ago.
His flower cookies are the melt-on-your-tongue yin to the crunchy, pecan-crisp yang of his renowned fingernut cookies that Wilson’s has made even more famous. The origins of both cookies are largely unknown.
Nygaard died in 2003 at age 94. Today, his four children, each of whom at times worked in his bakery, know nothing of how the cookies came to be. He apparently never divulged where he learned to make them or whether he dreamed them up himself.
In a recent email, his daughter Loisa Nygaard wrote of “the little we know” of where her father “got the recipe for his round decorated cookies.” She noted that while her father was schooled as a baker in Norway and later in Germany the recipe appears to hail from neither place.
Loisa Nygaard, a professor of Jewish and German studies at a university in California, further mentioned that “the round cookies,” as she referred to them, “are a lot of work.”
“They are,” she went on, “first squeezed out by hand, then baked, then decorated by hand one at a time — at high speed of course.”
She added: “My father was utterly devoted to his business. He also enjoyed being part of the early history of Warner Robins. … He liked it there, an Air Force town with people from all over where he was much better accepted than as an immigrant in Depression-era New York.”
This story was originally published July 31, 2023 at 7:00 AM.