Crumb and Get It: Oles name the best cookie on campus
Whether you need a caffeine boost or a sweet treat to lift your mood, the Cage cafe in Buntrock Commons is a beloved spot at St. Olaf College for both. Students line up after classes to grab quick meals, coffee, and baked goods. Most notably, the Cage cookies have long been popular, with both regular and specialty cookie options decorating the display cases to entice passersby.
A recent campus-wide poll ranked a few crumb-believable campus favorites: the Nutella, Cheesecake, and Chocolate Chunk cookies tied for third place. The Banana Chocolate Chip cookie took second –– a favorite for those who enjoy a gluten-free dessert. Keep reading to find out which cookie takes the cake for first place.
Approximately 2,600 cookies are made every day at the Cage with the help of staff and student workers. Even more desserts are prepared for other dining venues on campus. Student workers focus mainly on the baked goods that are sent to Stav, St. Olaf’s dining hall. Desserts such as slices of cake are baked, cut, and frosted by the students working behind the scenes in the bakery. Other tasks include baking the cookies for Stav, decorating Jell-O cups, and even helping prepare pizza dough.
St. Olaf student baker Mary Staplin ’26 says her favorite task on the job is preparing the cookies and muffins for the dining hall.
“I like making s’mores cookies, just because I know that people enjoy them,” she says. “Every time I’m putting them on trays, I think about how people will be excited that they are in Stav.”
Shifts at the bakery tend to be flexible for students, ranging from just a few hours to up to eight hours a week. Most students work two or three hours on their scheduled days, either in the early morning or evening.
Student baker Altea Nickell ’28 reflects on some of her highlights working in the bakery thus far.
“Sometimes we get to try stuff that’s experimental, which I think is really fun,” she says. “One time, staff were attempting a new cake that was lavender and lemon flavored and we got to try the lavender frosting.”
Nickell and her coworkers also enjoy playing music to keep the energy up in the bakery. Overall, she says one of her biggest highlights of the job is the community.
“I’ve made friends [at the bakery] and still say, ‘hi,’ to them around campus,” she explains. “You get to pass the hours talking to your coworkers about anything.”
Both Nickell and Staplin agree that they have perfected a batch of skills while working at the bakery — Nickell believes she’s grown most in teamwork, as there is an aspect of sharing space and communicating that is important in a bakery setting, and Staplin says she has felt empowered to ask questions, which helped grow her confidence and encouraged her to take initiative as a baker.
While student workers focus on the confections that go up to Stav, staff from Bon Appetit, St. Olaf’s dining vendor, prepare and decorate the specialty cookies most commonly seen in the Cage.
Specialty offerings include recurring favorites such as the Ole Cookie and Chocolate Chunk cookie. Others fall under what the team calls COWS or Cookies of the Week.
“We like to create cookies that create a kind of buzz around campus,” Cage pastry chef Jaime VanderWoude says. “We do a lot of research and stay in tune with current trends that are happening in the industry. We use them to be creative and see how we can apply them to our customer base here at St Olaf. We just keep our ears to the ground, and listen to see what the kids are asking for.”
The work of VanderWoude and her team extends beyond cookies to a wide range of desserts and pastries. For example, in addition to the cookie base, cheesecakes are made from scratch each morning and decorated with toppings from fruit to oreo cookies.
“I’ve made friends [at the bakery] and still say, ‘hi,’ to them around campus. You get to pass the hours talking to your coworkers about anything.”
— Altea Nickell ’28
VanderWoude has been a pastry chef since 2005. She graduated from Le Cordon Bleu and spent much of her career in retail pastry, specializing in wedding cakes. She says, “Transitioning from a grocery store pastry chef to leading a large-scale campus operation was eye-opening.”
Her highlights of working at St. Olaf include “being able to be more creative and create fun desserts, as well as have feedback from the students and make different desserts for the kids upstairs [in Stav] and the Cage. I get to create a lot of different holiday or seasonal desserts like for Christmas Fest and St. Patrick’s Day.”
The collaboration and creativity of bakers like VanderWoude, Nickell, and Staplin showcase how student work at St. Olaf is breaking the mold. Through on-campus mentorship, Oles have a chance to explore a creative passion while building applicable skills.
In addition to the third- and second- place finishers, the poll revealed that the Ole Cookie is the most loved cookie on campus. Made with oats, peanut butter, and M&M’s, this cookie is best known for being handed out to prospective Oles during Admitted Students Day — so it’s no surprise that this namesake cookie is so highly enjoyed on campus!
Feeling crumb-y at home and interested in making your very own Ole Cookie? Here’s the recipe:
Ingredients:
- ½ cup granulated sugar
- 1 tsp baking soda
- ½ tsp salt
- 2 ¼ cup rolled oats
- ¾ cup m&m’s or chocolate chips
- ½ cup packed light brown sugar
- ¾ cup smooth or chunky peanut butter (not natural)
- 2 Tbsp unsalted butter (softened)
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 2 eggs lightly beaten
Instructions:
- Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or spray with oil.
- In a bowl, combine the granulated sugar, baking soda, and salt.
- In a separate bowl, mix together the peanut butter, butter, vanilla and eggs.
- Mix dry and wet ingredients together. Form the dough into 2 inch balls and arrange on a baking sheet 2 inches apart.
- Bake for 12-14 minutes until the tops of the cookies begin to brown. Allow them to cool completely on a wire rack – then enjoy!
Contains peanuts.