Want to Make a Deer Dance? Offer It One of These Little Buttery Cookies

Dancing Deer Baking Company is a company of people passionate about food, nature, aesthetics and community. That’s a lot to be passionate about and still have enough energy left to invest into baking delicious, buttery cookies.

Dancing Deer was started by three company founders; all successful businesswomen from Boston, Massachusetts. The name comes from that of a quaint little New England antique shop owned by one of the women's grandmothers.

The founding troika included: a talented baker, Suzanne Lombardi, who originated many of Dancing Deer's recipes, a theoretical physicist/business strategist, Ayis Antoniou, who loves to cook, and a business woman/artist, Trish Carter, whose passion is nature and the environment. According to the company history; all three have since moved on, but many of their founding principles still remain with the management and employees of Dancing Deer.

Since 1994, the company has been known for its delicious tasting all-natural brownies, cookies, cakes and baking mixes, which are sold in specialty, natural food and grocery stores nationwide and online as gourmet gift arrangements for consumers and corporations. Dancing Deer has won many national awards and accolades for its distinctive products and innovative business practices, and was one of the first 25 Massachusetts companies to be certified as a Sustainable Business Leader. The company was awarded Elite status by STELLA Service in recognition of its high quality customer service. Dancing Deer places an enormous emphasis on giving back to the community, most notably by helping homeless and at-risk families through their Sweet Home Project.

On a recent trip through New England, Betsy and I discovered the great taste of Dancing Deer gourmet cookies in a little gift ship in Concord, New Hampshire. The store had four or five different types of cookies on their shelves. They looked awfully good, so we decided to try some at the shop owner’s recommendation.

We tried the “Tangerine Butterfly” shortbread cookies and found them to be firm, buttery and with a hint of orange flavor. They are so good you can’t eat just one. This is an all natural product with 0 transfat. Two small cookies equal about 150 calories, so go lightly – if you can.

Dancing Deer produces a fair number of distinct baked goods from brownies to shortbread cookies to cakes. The flavors are pretty unique, in many cases. Among the cookies are Molasses Clove and Sugar Cane Lime; the brownies include: salty caramel and peanut butter and jelly.

On a culinary website unrelated to the company a past customer of Dancing Deer products – perhaps - sums their cookies up best using the following expression:

"Surely these must be the cookies they serve in heaven!" They are among the best cookies I have ever eaten!

Now, these cookies aren’t cheap – especially if you order them at the company’s website. Even in the stores a small bag of cookies will run you about $6.50. The Dancing Deer website also provides an option to search for their products, locally. In doing our own search for New Jersey, we found Dancing Deer cookies to be available at a local Whole Foods Store in Middletown, NJ among other locations.

And so, you will ask, if company recipes are available for home baking. They are. In fact, company founder Trish Carter offers up some of her shortbread cookie recipes online at:

We enjoyed these cookies very much and will look for these and other Dancing Deer variations in our local area. If you like good cookies with a tall glass of ice cold milk, you should, too.