Hiya! My name is Maggie and I’m excited to share my passion for cooking and eating with all of you! Being in the kitchen after a hard day at work brings peace and balance to my life in a way that is hard to explain in words, but easy to show in the dishes I make. I’m still learning, and nothing I make is perfect, but that’s what I love most about cooking. I’m always learning something new, and I hope you find something new to love here too!
My blog name, The Real Cooking Maggie, came from my high school days when Cooking Mama was a big hit with my friends on the Nintendo Wii, and I happened to be the best at it among our group to the point where they would just call me Cooking Maggie. It also happened that I was seriously invested in my Food Technology class in school and always had something to share every week at lunch time, so the name stuck. However, as one does in this day in age, since Cooking Maggie was already taken on Instagram, I decided The Real Cooking Maggie was the next best, and here we are!
Frankie & I live in the northern suburbs of Chicago with our amazing Cardigan Welsh Corgi named Lord Tuggs. He’s on Instagram (@lordtuggs) in case anyone is looking for a lot of cute corgi content, and if you’d like to know more about what differentiates a Cardigan from a Pembroke (what the Queen breeds/owns), I’m always happy to answer questions! ANYWAY, the photo above is actually of us in front of our new home! Frankie actually grew up not too far from where we’ve decided to settle down and begin the next chapter of our lives, whereas I grew up in Hong Kong for most of my formative years, though I’m originally from southern Ohio. While I’m a Midwestern girl at heart, I have a serious sense of adventure and enjoy eating foods from all around the world, and making those dishes in my very own kitchen (see below!).
And as if I wasn’t trying to make myself any more busy than I am already, in 2017, I happened to be perusing CorgiThings.com (a great place for all things Corgis!) and came across some Pembroke & Cardigan cookie cutters! I was (and still am when it’s anything NOT cookies) not a great baker simply because I didn’t have the patience for it, but I thought, what the heck, let’s give it a go! So I did a lot of research, ordered my equipment and tools, and gave it a go! They definitely were NOT the prettiest, but they weren’t as bad as I thought they were going to be so I tried again, and they turned out better than the first time, so I decided…okay, I think I can make a go of this.
One thing led to another and before I knew it, I was having friends hire me for custom small orders, and after a year of that, Frankie suggested I try selling them on Etsy to see what happened. All I can say is I’ve now been in business for 2 years on Etsy and selling over 1,000 cookies every year! I’m still in shock at how quickly everything took off (my busiest time being during COVID’s 18-month lockdown at home). In addition to keeping me sane, it’s been a wild ride of technical adventure and just constant motivation to make each set better than the last. If you’d like to check out some of the sets I’ve been commissioned to design and make over the last year, you can check out my Instagram, my bi-weekly posts, or my Etsy Shop.
The Real Cooking Maggie 