Silent gratitude isn’t much use to anyone. – G.B. Stern

As a girl, chocolate is one of my favorite things. As an artist, color is one of my favorite things. As a 20-something, the Internet is one of my things. (Un)fortunately, there’s something that feeds all of these addictions; it’s called Pinterest (or as my mom says, “Pin-interest”. In case you’re not familiar, Pinterest is a wonderful, horrible black hole of creativity & awesomeness that can make an hour go by faster than a scared cat. I love it 🙂 Lately, I’ve been trying my hand at some of the recipes that I’ve pinned & have been pleasantly surprised at the results. 1,000-layer chocolate chip cookies, lazy cake cookies & Nutella cookies have all fallen before my new found prowess, muah ha ha.

But the downside of learning you have baking as a new semi-secret power is that then you have a huge amount of tempting goodies lying around calling out to be eaten. Sooo, to quiet tiny cookie voices, I decided to give them away. To whom?, you might ask. Why not me?, you might also ask, but I think I chose some worthy recipients—members of the Olathe Fire Department. Especially since they had to go out on a call today when the high was 98 degrees F.

I had first thought to take something to the police, but upon consulting Google, I discovered they aren’t allowed to accept anything not prepackaged. With that in mind, I decided to call the fire station before stopping by in case they had similar rules. The man who answered identified himself as Anderson & when I asked if I could bring something by, he responded so enthusiastically, it just made my day. After trying to make sure there was enough variety (I used all of the recipes listed above, though the lazy cake cookies became blueberry cake cookies, & also made peanut butter cookies), I drove over only to find that they were out on a call. A second try worked & the men of station 4 were super sweethearts. They laughed at my bad jokes as I experienced of one of my rare shy spells. This was my first time ever taking something to our public servants & it’s been one of the best experiences I’ve had all month. Thanks, guys!