OurName

What's Behind the Name?

Why AuntieLicious? Well, it’s kind of a long story. Not War and Peace long, but long in terms of time and experiences. So maybe I should get started…

I come from a long line of loving Aunties. BTW, hailing from New England as we do, we pronounce it Ahn-tee. This is a very important distinction. I have nieces and nephews living all across the country and they were all raised to say Ahn-tee. Not Ann-tee like their Ohio-California-Maryland-Georgia friends would say. Ahn-tee, the way it should be! Though the kids from Ohio have Ant-tees on their dad’s side. But we love them anyway!

My father, whose mother died when he was two, was raised by three very special Aunties. Really these women were my great-aunts. Or grand-aunts. I’m not sure which because it didn’t matter to us. They were just The Aunts. And they were special. My dad was an only child, so The Aunts were the only aunts we had on his side of the family. My mom had five sisters and a brother, just like me. Technically my siblings and I only had five aunts, but my uncle’s wife has always been an Auntie to us so we always felt like we had six aunts. Add them to the three aunts on my Dad’s side and we had nine. Except my grandmother had a sister so she was an aunt to us, too. Not my grandmother, her sister. Because my grandmother already was my grandmother. Get it? That makes ten aunts.

Oh yeah, and then there was Aunt Sis, who wasn’t really our aunt. In fact, she wasn’t really a sister to anyone in my family, but she was kind of a Sis to my mom and her sisters so she kind of was our aunt. So we called her Aunt Sis. Except her kids weren’t our cousins. Try and figure that out when you’re a pre-schooler! But we had thirty-five cousins already, along with a whole bunch of second cousins, whose mothers were our aunts but weren’t really because they were G aunts. That would be great- or grand- aunts but I’m not sure which. I could probably figure it out. I could probably Google it. Or I could just call them Google aunts. But we are all family so it really doesn’t matter, does it? Family is family, and I’ve got a great big one. That would be great and big, not just great-big. I think you kinda get the picture. It would be a wide angle picture. Probably even panoramic. Especially if you threw in the cousins, including the ones who aren’t really cousins. Technically speaking. Oh, and just to confuse things even more, my cousins’ kids call me Auntie, too. That’s a lot of kids.

So, now that I’ve cleared all that up, let’s get back to my story.

Way back in the day, when I was a high school senior, my oldest sister gave birth to her and her husband’s first child, an adorable little girl they named Elizabeth. I instantly fell in love. We call her Liz, and she is now a grown-up and an Auntie in her own right.

Anyway, the summer after I graduated from high school I played on my town’s women’s softball team. The players ranged in age from eighteen to forty-something. One of my teammates was a year older than I and she had been an aunt for awhile. Sometimes her nephew would sit on the bench with us and he would call her Auntie. When I first heard that I instantly knew I wanted Liz to call me Auntie. It made no difference that all my aunts were, well, Aunts. I wanted to be an Auntie. It would be several months before Liz could talk but “Auntie” quickly became an integral part of her growing vocabulary.

Fast forward to the present day and I now have fourteen nieces and nephews. One of my nieces has two kids, so I guess that makes me a great aunt. Or a grand aunt. Or the aforementioned Google Aunt. Whatever. To them I’m just Auntie. So that makes sixteen nieces and nephews. Plus their friends, who know me as Auntie. I’m not sure how many that would make but trust me, it’s a lot of kids. Some of the older kids call me by name, but most of them still call me Auntie. Liz, bless her heart, still calls me Auntie at times. She still addresses my mail to Auntie. Last year she sent me a birthday gift with a note addressed to Auntie. That is what inspired me to call my company AuntieLicious. That and the fact that all these kids love my cookies. Especially Liz, who especially likes the peanut butter cookies with the chocolate Hershey’s Kisses on top. She loves them so much that, one November years ago, Liz was having Thanksgiving dinner with her family and a bunch of us Aunties. Come time for dessert we found that Liz had eaten the Kisses off all the cookies. ALL the Kisses. Off ALL the cookies! So now I think of Liz whenever I make these cookies - Liz's Peanut Butter Buttons. I just don’t let her near them!

And I think of Adam when I make chocolate chip cookies. Adam really likes my chocolate chip cookies. When he was little –as a college rugby player he’s not so little anymore, but when he was – I would make a batch of cookie dough. I’d bake a couple dozen cookies, then drop the rest of the dough on a baking sheet and freeze it. These frozen drops of dough were put into ZipLoc bags and called cookie balls. Adam loved to eat the frozen cookie balls. One day he asked “Auntie, can I have some cookie balls?” I reminded him to say “May I?” so he asked again… “Auntie, please may I can have some cookie balls?” How can you say no to that? Well, maybe somewhere down the line I’ll figure out how to package and freeze and ship cookie balls. But til then, if you get a cravin’ for cookie balls…and you know you will…you’ll have to buddy up to Adam and see if he’ll share.

Adam has a “little” brother named Nick. Nick also plays rugby and goes to college. Nick is our quirky kid. He’s our family’s very own Ferris Bueller. And he’s still very particular about what he eats. Ya know the kind of kid who wouldn’t eat his dinner if his mashed potatoes touched his corn, and he wouldn’t give you a lick off his ice cream cone because you had “gerems”? That was Nick. That IS Nick. And Nick doesn’t like chocolate chips in his chocolate chip cookies. So that’s where we came up with Nick’s Naked Cookies. Homemade gooey chocolate chip cookies without the gooey chocolate chips. They’re so good you don’t even miss the chips!