The official Dancing Deer Baking Company Blog

Growing up in Boston, it would be hard to avoid the Red Sox (if for some strange reason you wanted to).  Fenway Park, Kenmore Square, the Green Monster, the Citgo sign…they’re all city landmarks.  For Father’s Day, we found a way to celebrate baseball-loving Dads, summer and the Sox with our Limited Edition Fenway Park Gift Tower.  The tower includes a Fenway Park replica tin filled with yummy, vanilla shortbread cookies that are shaped like baseballs!  They’re not regulation size baseballs, but they are tasty (IR)regardless. 

Once we featured Fenway, we couldn’t help but feature Yankee Stadium for our New York, New Jersey and (select) Connecticut residents.  You will never find me rooting for the Bronx Bombers, but baseball season would definitely lose most of its excitement without those anticipated Sox/Yankees games.

And if you find yourself on neither side of the rivalry, but still love our national pastime, celebrate with the Baseball National Hall of Fame Gift Tower.  Each tower includes traditional, gourmet vanilla baseball cookies and chocolate chunk brownies – you really can’t miss with that combination.

Peanuts and Cracker Jacks are great, but why not do something different for Dad this baseball season?  Check out all three baseball gift towers on our website: http://www.dancingdeer.com/baseball-gifts.

(National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum trademarks and copyrights are used with permission of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Major League Baseball trademarks and copyrights are used with permission of Major League Baseball Properties, Inc. MLB.com. Dancing Deer is a retail partner of Cooperstown Cookie Company and is not a licensee/sponsor of MLB®, Red Sox or Yankees.)

At Dancing Deer, we love our holidays.  We get to bake decorative cookies for the season and we always make time for a celebration in the bakery with all the Deer.  St Patrick’s Day is next on the calendar – and you know what they say, “Everyone’s Irish on St Patrick’s Day!”  So, send some Lucky Clover Cookies to all of your IRISH friends and if you enjoy arts and crafts, click here to learn how to make an Origami 4-leaf clover (don’t worry, I tried it myself to rate the difficulty – I give it a rating of easy to medium difficulty level)

Friday, how we wait for you all week!  Now it’s time cool off and warm up for the weekend. So the weather is cold, and I am ready to snuggle up with latte and my favorite cookies, Sugar Cane Lime. Do you have a favorite Friday cookie? 

Email us your favorite cookie and WHY and the Deer fan with the best answer will get a box of their favorite cookies for FREE!!!! (click here to email us your replies).

Roses are Red
Violets are Blue
Our cookies are too good to be true!

I started working here at Dancing Deer in November as a customer service representative (who happens to like blogging). Since November, I have tried to find a better cookie or brownie - to no avail. I have had cookies from all over the world and to this date Dancing Deer has won that spot in my heart for sweets. The brownies are gooey like they just came out of the oven; the cookies are chewy like a cookie should be. I truly love our cookies and I don’t know how most people share them because I don’t or won’t.

Move over roses, you’ve been replaced with our decadent Valentine’s Brownie & Cookie Tower. Our tower is the perfect gift for kids away at college, or friends and of course that special someone to show them you care. It showcases our chewy yummy cookies with our perfect gooey brownies and our perfect crisp shortbread cookies. Bon Apetit! 

…. Or at least that’s what I hear. I love giving brownies to loved ones. First off - our Brownie Hearts are the size of my head and nothing says love like a brownie the size of a 1st grader, right? Right. Oh, and by the way my head is quite large, but more so I was going for the effect.

So now’s the time to get your list together for Valentines Day, show the people closest and furthest away that you care with Dancing Deer’s gourmet gifts. So here it is - we have hand-decorated L-O-V-E Letter Cookies for the special someone (me or significant other), humongous brownies for your kids & delightfully crunchy vanilla butter shortbread hearts for your friends to let them know your love is like a dancing deer cookie, you don’t want to share it’s soooo good.

So, friends, call us up and send some lovin!

You never outgrow snack time. And at Dancing Deer, we’re surrounded by the yummy aromas of brownies, cakes, cookies baking - it’s tempting to spend all our time on snack time.  What memories does snack time bring to life for you?

We ask our Deers on Twitter to share a few memories. Here’s what they wrote.

@talkingwithtami: At least once a week, I meet with my son for lunch at his school. This past monday was his birthday, I went to school and we had lunch with him and some snacks. The kids were pointing saying yes that’s his mom she is on tv. That was a great memory of snacktime with my son plus the kids laughed and so did he!

@tubgoddess: snacktime - ants on a log (celery w/ peanut butter and raisins) or graham crackers with peanut butter! apples and peanut butter…

This holiday there’s plenty of time for snack time. May we recommend that one of your snacks include a Two-Tier Holiday Cookie Tower. 

These bite size shortbread cookies are in 8 yummy flavors and shapes.
Happy Holidays, from Dancing Deer Baking Company!

Each week we feature tweets, short updates on twitter of 140 characters or less, which exemplify Dancing Deer core values. These are the tweets we proudly share with our community, retweet to our followers and provide on our blogger. Each one of them offers a gift of insight we hope you’ll enjoy. And if you do, we encourage you to follow their author on Twitter.

Passion for food:

•@MarioAbdulF: Michael Voltaggio all the way winning Top Chef…awesome… here’s a chef who doesnt believe in mediocrity and has enormous passion for food.

Supporting the community:

•@falleri: @TiffenDfx You’re welcome (twice) I think Tiffen’s doing a great job supporting the community- really really love you for it!

Enjoying your work:

•@littlefluffycat: @colebitting You’re welcome! I am enjoying your work VERY much.

Caring for the environment:

•@SWMaina: Children messages on caring for the environment - pictures, Rwanda

Did you come across a tweet that exemplifies a core deer value? Tell us and we’ll feature it in our weekly tweets.

Congratulations Ann Funk!! You won the prize for this week’s quiz! Please send your mailing address to (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) so we can send you your yummy cookies!

The correct answer, of course, was Dancing Deer’s Brandy-Soaked Harvest Cake! Chock full of pecans, dates, candied ginger, pistachios, dried cherries and raisins, and with just the right amount of brandy for good measure, this cake has a delightfully unique taste.

Thanks to everyone for participating!

Each week, we honor a Deer in the Spotlight- someone who embodies characteristics that we strive after. Mindy Lockard ( @MonthlyManner on Twitter ) is this week’s Deer in the Spotlight.

Mindy is a nationally recognized etiquette guru who believes that we are responsible for the social legacy we leave behind- that manners are the key to a brighter future. Check out Mindy’s blog!

Here’s an excerpt from our interview with Mindy:

DD: Manners can be seen as taking care of small details- caring by spending the extra time to make situations better for others. Who taught you to care deeply about others by expressing interest in the brief interactions pertaining to them?

Mindy: My love of gracious living was inspired by two very important women in my life: My mother and my mother’s mother. Growing-up in a middle class home we didn’t always have money for the “finer things;” however, my mother always impressed on us the value of fine living. As the oldest of four children our home was the practice ground for gracious living. As a young child my mother was diligent about instilling the basics of kindness and respect. My mother’s confidence and conviction in the lessons she taught us allowed us to feel socially and graciously confident.

My grandmother lived a most gracious life. What I learned from her wasn’t as much about what she said but how she lived. As a lover of the written word, she wrote to me on a weekly basis throughout my late teens and early twenties. After a visit, she often would pick a small bouquet of flowers and leave them in a cup on my bedside table. Before she became ill, she would shuffle down the rows of her mobile home park in her house slippers delivering cups of flowers from her garden. She never knew a stranger and committed her life to serving others. But most of all, my Grandmother loved God and taught me the importance of treating others well out of respect and love for Him!

DD: We believe that gifting is a way of life. What is the best way to remember small details from a conversation, in order to be able to apply that detail to future interactions with a friend?

Mindy: One of the greatest gifts we can give others is the present of our presence. Not presence as in the physical, but presence in the mental. The most important way to remember details is to pay attention by asking questions and listening to the response.  When we take the time to stop and commit attention to listening to a friend we have the mental awareness to commit what they are saying to memory.

Each week we feature tweets, short updates on Twitter of 140 characters or less, which exemplify Dancing Deer’s core values. These are the tweets we proudly share with our community, retweet to our followers and post on our blog. Each one of them offers a gift of insight we hope you’ll enjoy. And if you do, we encourage you to follow their author on Twitter.

Passion for food:

@carol_phillips: Blog posts about Millennials and their passion for food.

Passion for nature:

@cheecker: Thanks for the mention- @KarenCalifornia- and right back at ya for being good people with your passion for getting kids out to nature.

Supporting the community:

@UnitedWayCgy: Warm up with a cup of coffee from Café Koi. 20% of the coffee sales will go to United Way to support our community.

Did you come across a tweet that exemplifies a core Deer value? Tell us in the comments below and we’ll feature it in our weekly tweets!

Who was your best friend growing up?  Which person in specific made you laugh in childhood, carried you through hard times and shared with you the experiences that shaped who you are? Time passes bringing with it responsibilities, and often times physical distance between friends. We may see those who were once such a vibrant part of our lives less often.

As we share and celebrate with our families and our new friends, the holidays are a great time for us to remember our old friendships as well.

Who was the first person to give you the gift of friendship? Do you keep up with them? Are you connected on Facebook?

Take a minute to find them. When you do,  tell them what that gift of friendship meant to you. Share an old memory that only you two will understand. Let them know what their friendship means to you.

How do celebrate the gift of friendship? What have you done this year to make your friendships feel appreciated?  Share your ideas with the Deers
below.

We¹re choosing to celebrate friendship at Dancing Deer with our Holiday Stars.

We believe that good friends are like stars - you can’t always see them but you know they are always there guiding you!

Hospitality is an important part of every culture. Whether it’s offering your guests tea and cookies, or the small gestures a host extends to make their guest feel at home, hospitality matters. At Dancing Deer, being good host is apart of our culture, too.  In what was do you incorporate hospitality into your holiday celebrations? What traditions do you follow, as a host, which makes your guests feel more at home? We would like to hear about them.

The Chicago Tribune recently published an article about hospitality . In it, Phil Vettel shares his simple motto for being hospitability this holiday season, “Life is short. Put out the good stuff.”

If you are either a guest or host this year, may we suggest our “good stuff,” a maple pumpkin holiday cake: It’s a delicious cake with friends and neighbors - or anyone who happens to stop in during the holiday season!

Each week, we honor a Deer in the Spotlight- someone who embodies our values. Leo Babauta (@zen_habits on Twitter) is this week’s Deer in the Spotlight. Leo is a celebrated top-25 blogger who dedicates his time to others, offering them tips on how to focus their priorities and be more efficient at what they do.

We recently interviewed Leo and have shared his perspective below:
DD:  When did you first determine that living a minimalist lifestyle helped you focus your priorities?
LB: It’s been a gradual realization and learning process, but I’ve been fascinated with simplifying for over a decade. As I’ve simplified
slowly, I’ve gotten better at it, and at each stage I learn the things necessary to move me to the next stage. Priorities are at the heart of it, and as you simplify, stripping things down to the essential, you must consider and decide what is essential.
DD: In one of your blog posts, you mention defeating burnout. Did you ever burn out? Was a cluttered lifestyle the cause?
LB: I’ve burned out a number of times, and each time, I decided to change my life and usually my job. Overwork and trying to take on too much was usually the cause. Simplifying my life was usually the solution, as was finding a new challenge that excited me, and better aligned with my priorities.

DD: What could you say to a person who has many things cluttering their time?
LB: If you aren’t able to achieve the things you want to achieve, do the things that you think are important, and have the life you want, then I’d say simplifying your life is the answer. Start by figuring out the 4-5 things that are most important to you (your short list), then make a list of everything in your life that takes up time, that is a time commitment, and eliminate things on this list that aren’t on the short list. Slowly, and over time.

DD: What is your favorite activity to do with your family time?

LB: Reading and talking with my kids. Physical things, like playing soccer or shooting Nerf darts at each other, are also loads of fun.

We encourage you to visit Leo’s blog for more valuable guidance from Leo, the Deer in the Spotlight.

Each week we feature tweets, short updates on twitter of 140 characters or less, which exemplify Dancing Deer core values. These are the tweets we proudly share with our community, retweet to our followers and provide on our blogger. Each one of them offers a gift of insight we hope you’ll enjoy. And if you do, we encourage you to follow their author on Twitter.

Passion for Food:
•    @kjrainford: How great is Jamie Oliver’s enthusiasm? If only everyone had his passion for food!

Supporting the Community:
•    @Human_Solutions: @JeanRgr we are so thrilled about this Wish Book. Thank you, Oregonian, for supporting the community this way!

Passion for Nature:
•    @Luckynumbr22: One random fact about me that my family knows well: I love nature. It’s so beautiful… Trees, flowers, sunsets, sunrises, etc.

Did you come across a tweet that exemplifies a core deer value? Tell us in the comments section below and we’ll feature it on our Weekly Tweets blog post!

At Dancing Deer, we know there are people in our community that personify core values near and dear to our heart. Each week, we ask you to Nominate a Deer that we can highlight for the week for outstanding service to the community.
This week, Julie Balls nominated Dana Moritz for being “a good friend and inspiration.”
Here is more of what Julie said about Dana:
“Dana is a remarkable person.  She is energetic, supportive and inspiring.  As a Beach body Coach she inspires people to be conscience of their bodies and what they put in them.  She has a blog and is always sharing with us good, healthy recipes to try and products that are good for us, and good for our earth.

She is nearing the end of a 16-week period of nursing her husband after a terrible motorcycle accident.  She has rarely left his side, thru her love and support he has been able to maintain his spirits and improve his recovery process.  Not to say there weren’t some difficult days, but her positive attitude got them thru them.”
Dana, thank you for being an inspiration to Julie this week. Your dedication to helping other people makes us what to be better at what we do here at Dancing Deer. We hope you both have an amazing week, because you have brought joy to ours!

If you know of a deer making in a difference in their community, nominate them here.