Cookie in the Kitchen: Nashville’s Henegar bakes works of art
To state the obvious, Harry Styles is a sharp dresser. Still, you’ll probably gain a new level of respect for the pop star’s fashion sense once you see Emily Henegar’s vivid illustrations.
Last year, the 22-year-old Nashvillian recreated 18 of Styles’ most iconic looks – detailing them down to the ruffles, fringes and buttons – with a brilliantly balanced color palette.
On top of all that, they were delicious. Welcome to the world of Cookie In The Kitchen – Henegar’s one-woman business specializing in handcrafted, custom-designed sugar cookies. Armed with dozens of piping bags filled with brightly colored icing, she’s turned seemingly everything into a confection, from famous musicians to sneakers, beloved pets, graduation caps and engagement rings.
Henegar got into the business when she was just 11 years old, selling batches to friends and family in her native Atlanta, Ga. She came to Nashville four years ago to attend Belmont University, studying entrepreneurship and graphic design with the goal of opening her own bakery.
It wasn’t long before Music City took notice of her work. Henegar was still a freshman when local concert venues began hiring her to design cookies as gifts for big-name acts coming to town. As she shared the results on social media, her profile – and the orders – quickly began to snowball.
Since graduating from Belmont this year, she has made Cookie In The Kitchen her full-time job. And it sounds like it couldn’t get much fuller.
When The Tennessean visits Henegar at her home in East Nashville, it’s a Thursday afternoon, which means she’s doing all of the icing for her Friday and Saturday orders. This weekend, there’s
about a dozen of them, with clients ranging from a fan celebration of Taylor Swift album to a toddler’s party.
A laptop with her computer-drawn designs sits on the kitchen counter, next to a stack of some two-dozen pipe bags filled with every color she’ll need.
“People will ask me, ‘Oh, are you a drawer and painter outside of cookies?’ ” Henegar says. “I’m like, ‘Not really.’ There’s something about the pipe bag. It just works.”
‘I can just see this on a cookie’
Clearly, Henegar and this medium were meant to be. Things really fell into place back in her sophomore year of high school, when she took a graphic design course and realized she could make a cookie her canvas. She was also starting to go to concerts, with many of her favorite indie acts stopping in Atlanta on tour.
Among those was the pop duo Oh Wonder, whose debut album cover was a simple black-and-white design with the band’s name and “OW” in capital letters. That’s when Henegar had her “eureka” moment (cue the theme from Kubrick’s “2001”).
“I was like, ‘I just can see this on a cookie,’ ” she recalls.
Soon enough, she was talking her way through the door of an Atlanta club
with a box of custom-designed cookies for the band. She didn’t get to meet them that night, but the box found its way backstage, and soon Oh Wonder was posting about their incredible gift on Instagram.
“Hold on. I’ve done something here,” Henegar remembers thinking. Soon, no artist in her record collection would pass through Atlanta without receiving their own personalized dozen.
There was one legendary week during her junior year, where she made cookies for Declan Mckenna, Tessa Violet, and COIN – on top of studying for a big math test (she got an A). And the results quickly grew more elaborate, as
Henegar spent more and more time researching her subjects.
“It started to unlock (the idea that) I don’t just want to put your album cover on a cookie. I want to put things that are going to reflect who you are, your personality and your story.”
You can see the effect this attention to detail has on the recipients in one of Henegar’s latest social media videos. Outside of Brooklyn Bowl Nashville, she presented a box to indie-folk artist Madison Cunningham.
“Holy cow,” Cunningham said, gasping as she pointed to a cookie likeness of her dog.
From her earliest days of bringing cookies to clubs, Henegar says, “The most fun thing for me was connecting to them as an artist to an artist. It kind of broke this fan barrier down…we’re both admiring each other’s work and the talent that goes into that.”
‘... my art lives rent-free on Harry Styles’ phone’
Bridgestone Arena was the first Nashville venue to commission cookies from Henegar – not long after she enrolled at Belmont – for a Travis Scott concert. Since then, she’s made sets for Ariana Grande, Dua Lipa, Kacey Musgraves, The Lumineers, John Mayer and Jack Harlow, with several artists posting about them afterwards.
But if Henegar has a magnum opus, it was her Harry Styles set. She pitched the idea to Bridgestone ahead of his 2021 concert there, and polled his rabid fanbase for ideas. The results, as she’d hoped, were wildly popular on Instagram, and even more so on Tiktok, where her account grew from a few hundred followers to 80,000 in a matter of weeks.
On top of all that, word came from backstage that Styles was very happy with the gift, and snapped a few photos.
“It’s pretty crazy to think that my art lives rent-free on Harry Styles’ phone,” Henegar says with a laugh.
Of course, making cookies for pop stars can’t be a full-time gig (not yet, anyway), so Cookie In The Kitchen has already built a broad client base. Surprisingly, she’s just done her first-ever set of bachelorette cookies – “I’m honestly surprised I haven’t done like 40 of them yet,” she says.
“I don’t think I could have dreamed up a better city to establish my business, just with how entrepreneurial it is, and musical and collaborative.”
Her next step, she hopes, is to pursue the vision she’s had since she first started selling batches: owning her own bakery.
“I really, really care about atmosphere and creating a space for people to engage in community and in creativity – and lingering,” she says. “I mean, I spend hours upon hours designing cookies in coffee shops. I just would love for my bakery to be a place for people to do that.”
Learn more about Henegar and Cookie In The Kitchen at www.cookieinthekitchen.com, or follow her on Instagram and Tiktok at @cookieinthekitchen