Matthew Burnette, Staff Writer

Santa may be in for a special treat this year if he’s lucky enough to get his hands on one of the cookies from Girly Ghoul Cookie Co., a local business started back in 2022.

Taylor Turner, the owner and sole cookie maker, says she found inspiration after purchasing some decorated cookies for her son’s birthday party and wanted to see if she could make them herself.

“I just wanted to make them for my kids, so in 2022 I made a Halloween set just for fun and posted them online and people were like ‘You should do this!’ so I just started taking orders,” says Turner. “It’s been fun. It’s really taken off.”

The Girly Ghoul name stems from Turner and her husband mutual love for Halloween. Turner says she hasn’t taken any baking classes but attended what her husband refers to as “YouTube University.”

“I’m kind of artsy anyways, so I basically just watched a bunch of YouTube videos,” she explained. “You know you go to TikTok and Instagram and follow people that do it and I just started practicing.”

Turner’s husband Alex says she had a knack for cookie baking almost instantly.

“You literally started doing it and you were good, and I’m not just saying that,” he said to his wife from the kitchen while making their children’s lunch. “The very first cookie you did I was like ‘Oh, so you just know how to do this now.’”

“It’s sickening. You didn’t have to try,” he jokingly added.

All of Turner’s cookies are what she calls your “standard sugar cookie” and then she decorates the top with royal icing.

“Thankfully royal icing is pretty forgiving,” she remarked. “You can kind of scrape it off and just start over. It’s not like you do it and you only get one chance at it. On bad weeks I have to do that a couple of times but normally I don’t have to do that.”

The process that Turner uses to make and decorate her cookies requires a lot of time and attention. She hand cuts every cookie with a knife using a stencil she makes out of watercolor paper. Every color that goes on the cookie must have two different icings: one for the outline, and one for filling in the design, or flooding as it’s known in the baking world.

The decorated cookies then have to dry for anywhere between twenty-four to forty-eight hours.

“I do stay pretty consistent, but because I’m a stay-at-home mom, I definitely don’t take on what I could because the process is so long,” Turner explained. “It’s like I sacrifice time with them, or I sacrifice orders. I could stay consistently busy, but that’s all I would be doing is cookies, so I try to limit my orders throughout the week.”

Turner says she can generally make whatever the customer wants. She often finds ideas from sites like Pinterest and Instagram, but one of her most common inspirations is stickers.

“Sticker art for me is easy to replicate because I feel like the way I decorate stuff is super simple, but it looks clean and stickers kind of have that look,” says Truner. “I don’t do anything too intricate, but like a clean sticker a lot of times I can duplicate or add something here or there to make it original. I’ve drawn up several of my own.”

 For her son Thorin’s most recent birthday, Turner had to create her own design for some Spiderman/Venom cookies. Thorin is also good at giving his mom cookie ideas.

“Maybe when we go to Disney World, you can do Mickey Mouse cookies,” suggested Thorin while hanging out in the kitchen.

Christmas and Halloween are prime selling times for the Girly Ghoul’s cookies since parents like to bring them to the classroom for parties. Turner has also made cookies for baby showers, wedding showers, and even tattoo events in Murfreesboro. She tries to sell cookies in batches of twelve because that’s what her recipe makes, and she doesn’t like having extra dough.

This year, Turner started selling 14-inch chocolate chip cookie cakes for Thanksgiving and has some ideas for Christmas as well.

“I have thought about doing like the Elf on the Shelf on the first day of December with like a letter or something, so I have thought about that this year,” she explained. “But having two small kids, there’s not a lot of time before Christmas to like crank those out, but knowing myself, I probably will. It’ll be like a last-minute special.”

“It’s been nice and I’m fortunate that when I post flash sales and things like that, people are pretty responsive to it,” she added.

All orders are made through the Girly Ghoul Cookie Co. Facebook page. Turner says she’d like to expand some and do more events.

“I know people that will set up at the farmers’ market or conventions,” she says. “I really love the Manchester clientele, but I feel like there’s more activity for cookie makers in the Murfreesboro area, and we’re so close. I would hope to do more like that or maybe like set up in a shop somewhere because once they’re packaged, they’re good for two weeks.”

Girly Ghoul Cookie Co. doesn’t have a lot of advertising, which is why Turner says she’s flattered that 75% of her customers are repeat who often suggest her to others.

“People that order from me, they’ll tag me in other people’s posts that are looking for cookie makers, so that lets me know that they would recommend me because I think people forget to leave reviews sometimes on the business page,” she says. “To me, that’s another form of ‘These are good, and I recommend them.’ People have definitely been nice about it, and they have been encouraging about it.”

Turner explained that she is very appreciative of people who buy her cookies because it goes back into her home and hopes all her customers know how much work she puts into her cookies.

“I really take people’s designs, and I am also very flattered by the creative freedom people give me with my cookies and the trust that they have,” she says. “I know they are just cookies, but in times like this with the extra expense, people want to get a good product, so I really take that to heart and try to give people the best I can. It’s always flattering to be chosen, and I’m always super grateful.”