Community Spotlight is a regular feature that highlights and celebrates amazing fan projects in the Remedy community. For our first spotlight of 2025, we're taking a look at Jamie's delicate and extremely beautiful cookie designs centred around Alan Wake and Control.
With the cooler weather and the early nights, there are some hobbies that I get an urge to jump into; crocheting, wholesome video games, and despite annual regret, baking. There are a couple of personal foolproof recipes that I have, but any cookie with decorative icing? No, nope, no. Attempts were made.
While it's not my only cookie-related disaster, a couple of years ago I baked some gingerbread cookies before heading into the office. I worked at a games studio and so the gingerbread cookies were shaped as our protagonist, mimicking our recent gingerbread outfit. While the cookie was surprisingly authentic to the shape, the icing was… an experience. The result was a gooey mess that I presented with the “began to make it, had a breakdown, bon appétit” meme on Slack. Coincidentally, a month later, I got laid off from the company.
Which is a long winding way to say that when it comes to perfectly decorated cookies, I immediately declare witchcraft. Smooth flooding, perfect icing consistency, cocktail sticks being using to gentling nudge the pooling sugar, I am all for it, but I am also terrible at it. So when I discovered Jamie's incredible Control cookies, elegantly and carefully piped, with perfect lines and nerdy embellishes, I was in awe.
Over the past few months, she has created two Remedy-themed batches; the first inspired by Control, and more recently, and Alan Wake 2 with both looking far too good to eat. Though... she may have fixed that dilemma with her most recent project, more about later!
While it wasn't her first foray into game-related cookies, Jamie's incredible work first appeared on my timeline following the creation of her Control batch. Carefully constructed and iced, those delicious designs featured an array of different nerdy references including the FBC logo, office posters, enemy designs, Objects of Power and more. Included in the batch was a piped moth from the Poets of the Fall Ultraviolet cover, with delicately coloured wings.
It's hard to pick a favoruite from the collection when everything looks so good, but there's two designs from the Control lot that I especially wanted to spotlight. The first is the poster warning that "delays caused by house shifts do not count towards overtime". The white text in icing is so exact and perfect that it feels almost magical in how satisyfing it looks. The second is the enemy designs, drawn in black against white icing with highlighted areas of red. I've never dared to draw on icing; first of all my icing has never been that smooth, and second there's very little you can do to recover it if you mess up. The fact that Jamie has created not one but five of these enemy designs, in such accurate and gruesome detail is astounding.
With the first Control batch out of the oven, it wasn't long before she was returning for a second run. In early October, Jamie posted her newly piped Alan Wake 2 collection. The designs include the AWE and Scratch graphetti from the Dark Place, along with Alex Casey and Coffee World posters, alongside the Cult of the Tree icons. There's also a really nice balance of the old and the new imagry, with the original Clicker, thermoses, and torches surrounded by designs from the sequel.
Again, there's two that immediately grabbed me; the Coffee World poster and the Old Gods of Asgard emblem, both for their incredible fine detail. Jamie had made multiple designs of these two and managed to replicate the design and match them perfectly using icing. The small details and writing is just so disaplined and precise, created with severe focus and a steady hand. It's a talent and skillset that I know that I will never be able to achieve.
If these look too good to eat, there might be a way around that. In recent weeks, Jamie has has been experimenting with preserving the cookies for display. She has recently opened a shop on Etsy with her designs carefully preserved in resin and magnetised ready to pop on your fridge!
Check it out at etsy.com/shop/SweetEllisCookies
As soon as her photographs appeared on our timeline, I instantly fell in love with her designs and creativity, so I reached out to Jamie to see if we could learn a little more into her process and the work that goes into each of the batches. And she agreed! Check out our interview with the brilliant baker below…
First of all, we'd love to know a little more about you! Can you tell us about yourself?
My name is Jamie, I live in Texas and during the day I’m an assistant principal for Pre-k through 8th grade. My husband and I have two boys (13 and 9) that keep us very busy. When I’m not working or being the busy mom, you will find me either playing video games with my husband in the man cave or making my cookie creations come to life in the kitchen.
Was there anything that inspired you to start baking and mixing your other passions in with the hobby?
In 2014, Pinterest was really popular and I was pinning all sorts of new recipes and treats to try. One thing I had pinned was sugar cookies that came in fun shapes. I baked a Mickey Mouse shaped cookie and came across another pin with how to ice sugar cookies. I had so much fun with it that I hyper focused on learning how to bake and decorate cookies and here we are today. My first real “video game” cookies were the stop-motion videos I made with Super Mario Brothers and Pacman. Those were SO fun to make and from there, I decided I wanted to make more cookies based on video games.
As far as how I started to make video game cookies from new/current games, it all started when The Last of Us Part 2 came out. I was NOT a gamer at this point in my life but my husband was. With the new game coming out, he asked me to make The Last of Us cookies for him to munch on while he played the new game. Having not played the first game, I simply used Google to find inspiration images without knowing what was really important in the game. After he finished the game and was so amped up about it, I decided to see what all the hype was about and in 2020 I sat down to play my first real video game as an adult, The Last of Us. That was it, I was hooked. I immediately started Part 1 and when I was done I made the Part 2 cookie set. Thus began the marriage of video games and cookies.
Here is a fun little behind the scenes view of how these were made 👀
— Sweet Ellis Cookies (@CookiesEllis) October 7, 2024
Next project…turn these cookies into magnets so I can keep them forever 🍪🧲@SamLakeRMD @remedygames @TimePirateNinja @alanwake #alanwake #alanwake2 #heraldofdarkness #remedygames pic.twitter.com/lE0XoLEdLa
How long did it take to perfect the cookie and icing proportions? Whenever I've tried to do similar projects, it feels like it's a fine margin for error.
It took years for me to find the perfect recipe for my preference. I couldn’t even tell you how many different variations of a sugar cookie recipe I’ve tried to finally decide on a set of ingredients that has been the perfect match for my taste. The cookie dough must be just right, it’s a science! Butter must be the perfect temperature, the right amount of flour must be used or else, don’t overmix the butter/sugar, one wrong move and your cookie dough could be doomed and your cookies do not keep their shape. Royal icing is a much easier beast to figure out but it’s still a science to make sure you have the right proportions, so the icing does what you need.
How far ahead of time to do you plan out each of the pieces, and how long does it take you?
I start planning a cookie set the second I start a new video game. As I play, I pay attention to details in the game that might be important (like the freaker nest in my Days Gone set) or that I think just look cool (the journal pages from my Uncharted 4 set). I take screenshots with my PS5 when I come across something I want to recreate, or I write notes about a design I could make based off something from the game (like gunslingers/outlaw bandolier cookies in my Red Dead Redemption 2 set). After about a month or so, I’ve got a pretty good idea of what I want in the set. Once I finish the game and narrow down what designs I want in the set, I still have to spend time creating a design for a 3D printed cookie cutter (then printing it) vs. creating a design based off a cookie cutter shape I already have vs. hand cutting.
How and when were you introduced to Remedy's games?
I love to watch other people play video games I have played to see how they play compared to me. While watching 8BitTerror videos, she would talk about how much she loved Control. I am very picky about the types of games I play and after playing the same 3 or 4 games over and over, I decided to step outside of my comfort zone and try something new without really knowing what it was like. Hence, I played Control because she kept talking about it and I LOVED it. I loved it so much I decided I needed to make a cookie set.
Not sure why my brain has to be so extra but here we are. @SamLakeRMD @oldgodsofasgard @MikaelKasurinen @remedygames @TheCourtneyHope @ControlRemedy #control #jessefaden #thehiss #remedygames #fadenfriday pic.twitter.com/hLCFi42PGK
— Sweet Ellis Cookies (@CookiesEllis) August 4, 2024
What made you decide to create special cookie selection for Alan Wake 2 and Control?
After I finished Control and the Alan Wake DLC, I was talking to my husband that I didn’t really understand all the Alan Wake references, and he said Control and Alan Wake were in the same universe, and Alan Wake was weird like Control so I would probably like it too, and then I would be able to understand the references. With that, I played the first Alan Wake and enjoyed it so much I jumped right into Alan Wake 2. The Alan Wake cookies were calling my name and boy did I answer.
From start to finish, on average, how long does it take you to make and design a batch of cookies?
As far as how long it takes to actually create the set, I always wait until I have a 3+ day school break because these detailed sets take about 2-3 days. When it’s time for me to cookie, my family knows I’m in the zone and they are on their own! I will spend 12-14 hours a day with my airpods in and my hands at work. That third day is when I add any finishing touches, take photos, make any silly videos that come to mind and clean up my massive mess.
What is the design that you're the most proud of?
As far as my favorite design I’m most proud of, that is a hard one! There are a few that turned out so much better than I thought they would and that would be the distressed “Welcome to Saint Denis” sign from my Red Dead Redemption 2 set, the Tallneck from my Horizon set, and I just love the Deacon St. John biker jacket in my Days Gone set.
Fun fact: I love Days Gone so much that I named our new little bloodhound Deacon St. John. The St. John only comes out when he’s in trouble (which is all the time since he’s still a puppy).
What has been the trickiest design to get right?
I can say that the mongrel ring from my Days Gone set was the trickiest. I have made a Days Gone set twice and I included the ring both times and that one was a beast to get right because I’m a perfectionist so the engravings, raised parts, shadows, chains, everything was so hard to get accurate.
Do you have any upcoming projects that you're excited about or hoping to get underway?
I once again stepped outside of my comfort zone and am trying a new set of games that I’m loving! I started with Tomb Raider (loved it) and am currently playing Rise of the Tomb Raider with Shadow of the Tomb Raider being the last one I will play from this series. I have already started gathering notes for the cookie set I will make for these games so stay tuned…
I recently learned how to turn my cookies into magnets. After I take pictures, the family digs in but not all my cookies get eaten and it pains me to just throw the rest away because they feel like pieces of art. I started practicing turning them into magnets with the Control set and most recently tried again with the Alan Wake 2 cookies and low and behold, I can now preserve my cookies and stick them up where I can look at them forever and ever. :)
Thank you to Jamie for the interview! Make sure to follow her on Instagram, Etsy, Twitter for more beautiful cookies!
