Mother's Cookie Parade

Since 2008, west coast grocery stores have been bare and awaiting the return of Mother's Cookies Cookie PARADE!

Although Cookie PARADE! is not available, we can still be thankful Kellogg's purchased and continues to distribute most of the Mother's Cookies brand to this day. With a little creativity, Cookie PARADE! can be made at home. So follow along and join the Cookie PARADE!

Step 1 is quite easy if you live on the west coast, particularly if you have a Safeway or Von's nearby.

You will need 4 ingredients:

1) Mother's Circus Animal Cookies

2) Mother's Chocolate Chip Cookies

3) Mother's Double Fudge Sandwich Cookies

4) sugar cookies

You'll note a few ingredients look off-target but I'll get into those details shortly.

On with it!

All the cookie processes will be similar, the idea will be to distress the cookies a little bit to give them that signature blend.

First up is chocolate chip. Place the cookies in a storage container, or anything similar (paper bag, bowl with cover, cooking pot with lid). Gently but deliberately agitate the container as if you were panning for gold or shaking popcorn. The idea is to wear the cookies down, not to pulverized them. Once you get a good feel for each cookie type it should only take a couple minutes for each to finish. Break a few cookies before starting to get a very authentic look.

Iced animal cookies is up next, follow the same process as chocolate chip except you can be a little more aggressive with these guys.

You can separate the pink from white and do each color individually if you want the white cookies to come out cleaner. For sure, break a few animals up before shaking for best results.

Double Fudge sandwich cookies are a little bit of a departure from Cookie PARADE! as the original shape was round, but in later years went to square.

You can still buy round double fudge sandwich cookies made by other brands, but for authentic texture and taste I stuck with Mother's brand and just broke the bars in half, and even opened a few of them up. You can shake these up pretty hard, I even turned the container upside down and gave it some good rattles that way.

Please be sure to save all the crumbs, they are the secret ingredient at the end!

Mother's Cookies (Kellogg's) simply does not produce sugar cookies anymore.

These store-brand cookies were not chosen for any specific reason other than availability. You may find something much more desirable, but for now these are a placeholder.

I started out as usual by breaking a couple, and finished by shaking these quite aggressively,

Almost done!

This is it!

After more than 100 years since Mother's Cookies baked their first batch and more than 10 years since the last bag was made, there is still enough ingredients on store shelves to make Cookie PARADE!