Elizabeth Tamny has been immersed in the world of the cookie arts since December. She’s not baking snickerdoodles or Toll House, but rather applying her illustrative and calligraphic skills to sugar and chocolate-mint cookies. The cookies themselves may be fairly simple, but Tamny’s designs are anything but. They’re intricate, sometimes lacy filigrees and grids of royal icing, piped in thin lines that swirl and intersect, sometimes rising above the surface in elaborate, delicate spires and domes that echo the towering confectionary structures of the Napoleonic-era French chef Marie-Antoine Carême.

Tamny, a former art coordinator at the Reader, has become a “cookier,” one of the thousands of committed amateur and professional cookie decorators who inhabit whole frosted universes on Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube. But unlike a great many of her cohort, she doesn’t deal in cartoon or movie characters, instead drawing on her intersecting interests in illustration and “crazy architectural confectionary.” 

Tamny’s cookies are usually priced between $5 and $15 apiece. Find her on Twitter (@IllCookies), Instagram (@illustratedcookies), and Facebook.