Much like the insect, cicada cookie emerges from Beaver County man’s freezer after 17 years

Tom Davidson | Friday, June 28, 2019 4:06 p.m.

Submitted

Beaver attorney Robert A. Banks holds a 17-year-old cicada cookie he bought in 2002 from Kretchmar’s bakery. The bakery’s head decorator, Sheri Harrison, holds a fresh cookie for comparison.

Even Cookie Monster might pass on munching the treat Beaver County lawyer Robert Banks has kept in his freezer since 2002.

That’s the last time Kretchmar’s Bakery sold cookies that are decorated to look like the cicadas that have taken the region by swarm since early May.

Like the insect, they have red eyes that take people aback, owner Lincoln Kretchmar said.

“It has been our best selling cutout cookie for the last five weeks,” Kretchmar said.

Banks, 68, of Economy, is a regular customer. The bakery is around the corner from his office, and he’s been buying the freshly made cicada cookies for a month now. Banks recently remembered the cookie he put in the freezer 17 years ago, when the last brood of cicadas made their appearance, and the cookies were sold at the bakery.

“I kept the cookie in the house as a novelty,” Banks said. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t this be cute?’ ”

On Friday, he took it with him into town and showed it off at Kretchmar’s.

“They treated me like I was the king of England,” Banks said.

He posed for a picture with Kretchmar’s decorator Sheri Harrison that was posted on Facebook. Lincoln Kretchmar was tickled.

Neither tried the cookie to see how it aged.

The normal shelf life of a cookie bought at Krechmar’s is about 10 days, though freezing extends it further.

“I wouldn’t recommend eating a cookie that’s 17 years old,” Kretchmar said.

But the preserved cookie is “amazingly well kept,” he said.