“Say it with flowers.” Say it even better with flower-pressed cookies. Loria Stern created the original Flower Pressed Shortbread Cookie, each one uniquely designed with handpicked edible flowers and herbs pressed into shortbread.
The cookies were a natural evolution of Loria’s varied interests. In her youth, Loria was on her way to becoming a professional tennis player. The importance of her health led her to a burgeoning interest in the medicinal properties of plants. While still a teen, she left tennis and followed in the footsteps of her artistic family by pursuing an education in the visual arts. She was talented and successful.
As an adult, she lived in a cottage on a California estate with grounds an exuberant display of wildflowers as far as the eye could see. Her interest in plants was revived, and she attended a class in Medicinal and Edible Plants. At the time, she was exploring the culinary arts as a pastry chef. At first, she decorated her pastries with flowers. Then she discovered the best ways to extract the most flavor and the brightest colors from the flowers and applied them to the unbaked cookies. Through experimentation, she learned that some flowers wilt under any heat, some lose color and create an appealing nostalgic, faded look; and with others, the heat make the colors brighten and intensify.
Then an opportunity appeared. A friend was having a party with a “Flower Power” theme in honor of Georgia O’Keeffe. Perfect for the visual artist-amateur botanist-pastry chef to introduce her flower-pressed cookies.
Time to Make the Cookies
Loria insists on only the finest natural ingredients: organic flour, cane sugar, butter, eggs, salt, vanilla chocolate, and edible flowers and herbs. The edible flowers include violas, calendulas, bachelor buttons, nasturtiums, lavender and chamomile. All ingredients are sourced locally, and Loria harvests some flowers from her own garden.
Each cookie (about the size of a silver dollar) is handmade with the utmost love and care.
Flower Pressed Cookies
- Shortbread Cookies
- Gluten Free Raspberry Rose Shortbread Cookies
- Vegan Shortbread Cookies
- Gluten Free Vanilla Shortbread Cookies
- Gluten Free Chocolate Chip Cookies
Flower Pressed Cakes and Pies
- Vanilla on Vanilla Cake (custom-made and multi-tiered)
- Key Lime Pie
- Passion Flower Pie
- Adaptogenic Mushroom Chocolate Tart
- Foraged Flora Chocolate Tart
The Future of Eat Your Flowers
Loria is a well-known and much-celebrated chef. She has been featured in such publications as Vogue Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and Goop not only for her flower-pressed cookies, but her many other related activities: cooking fabulous meals, planning creative menus and teaching classes. Her first cookbook will be coming out in Spring 2023.
She continues to experiment with an apparently endless array of imaginative ideas. She has made a rainbow-swirl ice cream with flower petals that retain their colors yet melt seamlessly into the ice cream. She is also experimenting with tamales in which she places flowers in the corn husk, then steams the tamales, transferring the colors of the flowers to the tamales for a handpainted effect.
Loria’s artistic instincts will always result in works of art coming out of her kitchen, but her knowledge and use of the properties of wildflowers and herbs take her creations beyond the aesthetic. She coaxes from each botanical its natural flavor, every subtle and clear nuance, to the delight of discriminating palates.
Shark Tank Air Date: 03/03/2023 – Season 14 – Episode 15
