We all know and love Cookie Monster—the blue scraggly puppet who’s often accompanied by a mess of crumbs. A Sesame Street character since 1969, Cookie Monster was derived from a different creature originally developed for a
1966 General Foods Canada commercial. Over time, it became a toothless puppet with a big appetite for cookies.
And what about those treats that Cookie Monster is always scarfing down? According to The New York Times, they’re baked by Lara MacLean, a “puppet wrangler” for the Jim Henson Company. But you probably wouldn’t want to eat them.
MacLean developed the recipe in the 2000s, and it includes pancake mix, Grape-Nuts, puffed rice, instant coffee, and water. The cookies are topped with dollops of brown glue from hot glue guns that look like chocolate chips.
Apart from the glue, they’re pretty edible, but not nearly as flavorful as our chocolate chip cookies or monster cookies, which include plenty of sugar—not to mention real chocolate.
In the interview, MacLean said that the cookies are “kind of like dog treats.” She bakes them at her home—about two dozen per episode, according to the The New York Times. Prior to developing this recipe, the cookies were made with a mix of rice crackers and foams.
David Rudman, who has played Cookie Monster since 2001, said that MacLean’s cookies are “thin enough that it’ll explode into a hundred crumbs,” which is “where the comedy comes from.”