Signature: Dawn A. Strickland

Age: 53
Occupation: Delivery driver, Cookies By Design

Hometown: Baton Rouge

It’s a humble beginning.


No bright paint or letters fly down the road as screaming advertisements of the treasure within.

The sparkle comes from the heart.

Each day, Dawn Strickland drives her little pewter Toyota through boroughs from Watson to Gonzales to deliver Cookies By Design.


The starting point is always the bakery on Jefferson Highway that belongs to Gene and Teresa Consterdine, who wisely selected Strickland as their bearer of good tidings.

Destination: Anywhere love or joy is needed.

Over hundreds of thousands of miles, Strickland takes a road that diverges through woods, over bridges, across the city, around the Lakes.

Foot to gas, blue eyes focused on front doors, Strickland is giddy.

No GPS for her. She takes the old-fashioned way, a map resting always on her lap, pointing the way to homes, hospital floors, business wings.

“I love my job,” she says. “I really do enjoy watching people’s faces light up.”

Mid-February brings the sweetest time of all, she adds. Flowers are pretty, but sugar and dough prove more pliant.

It’s a better representation of the nature of real love that will always bend and melt with the sugar of years, the butter of circumstances.


Cookies shaped like panda bears prance. The frosting reads, “It’s Panda-monium without you.” Couples exchange private jokes on edible canvases.

A dozen cats in different colors. A sock monkey. Who knows what it all means? It’s personal.

Some even bring mementos to be stacked alongside the colorful messengers.

“People love to have fun with the bees,” Strickland chuckles.

Bee-lieve in us.


Bee mine.

Oh, love.