African art, pass the milk

As a public-school teacher of art and dance who happens to be married to a high school principal, Heather Mc Cartney knows some teaching tools are far more effective than others.

Cookies, for example, always work.

Which is why she has high hopes for her "Ethnic Edibles," oversized and vibrantly-iced cookies designed to add some African culture to the cookie jar.

Her memorable cookies come in chocolate, sugar and spice and are shaped like African Djembe (Jim-bay) drums, Ndebele (En-day-belly) dolls, tribal masks, even the African continent. They're almost too beautiful, and meaningful, to eat.

McCartney, who at 40 could pass for one of her students, says she got inspired to bake her cookies after a stirring trip to South Africa, where she was visiting her stepdaughter in 1997.

(McCartney, who teaches at The Beacon School, an alternative high school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan is married to White Plains High School principal, William Colavito.)

"The trip was both magical and powerful," says McCartney. "I saw my first breaching whale and baboons coming down from the mountains. I also saw miles and miles of shantytowns."

When McCartney isn't teaching modern dance, she's designing movable art murals with kids for a community service class she also teaches.

The artist in her, she says, was particularly moved by the decorative arts that spilled out onto the streets and villages: warm, rich fabrics; intricately carved woods; tribal masks; and the primitive dolls Ndebele children fashion from gourds, corncobs, clay and cloth.

"It's so different seeing the fabric in a store and then seeing a woman wearing it down the street in her everyday life," says McCartney, who lives in a sunny white house in the Bronx and seems to dance as she walks in her flowy, aubergine velvet pants.

Before leaving South Africa, she filled her travel bag with "passport" masks—masks the size of your palm with unique facial demarcations which various tribes use as distinguishing identification cards of sorts. She swears she had every intention of giving the brightly colored mud masks away to friends and family for Christmas and Kwanzaa that year.

But when the holidays came around, she admits, "I didn't have the heart to give them away. They were just too beautiful."

Instead, she baked a large batch of holiday ginger cookies shaped like the masks. Then, with intensely colored icing, she replicated each mask's facial expression onto a cookie.

"Cookie dough proved to be the ideal medium for me to replicate the African artwork I admired so much," she says. "The artist and teacher in me likes to push that creativity, whether it's making a dance or making a cookie. Besides, I figured if I made a mistake, I could just eat it away."

Friends were so impressed by the cookies' artistry they urged McCartney to go into business. She refined her recipe and started making cookies in small batches, which she sold for $2 a piece at boutiques that cater to an African-American clientele.

"People said they were too pretty to eat," says McCartney. "My attitude was, get over it! If I can make them, anyone can."

So, instead of mass producing the cookies, the educator in her developed Ethnic Edibles Baking Kits, so people could learn to make their own at home. Each kit contains four African motif cookie cutters, some chocolate cookie mix, an icing bag, recipes, design suggestions and, best of all, some colorful background on the origins of the Ndebele doll and the Djembe drum along with some of McCartney's favorite African proverbs.

Since she developed her Web site (www.ethnicedibles.com) she's been hearing from libraries and schools across the country interested in using the kits for educational programs. Sales have been particularly brisk of late, in honor of Black History Month. Caterers, small and large, have also been ordering kits, which sell for about $20.

"One woman taking an African history class in New Jersey bought up a whole bunch for each of her classmates," says McCartney, who will be interviewed about her cookies on Barbara Smith's new lifestyle show on NBC Saturday morning.

One of the most gratifying orders, she says, came from the new Afro American Museum in Boston which ordered kits for its gift shop.

Some parents are using the cutters for lunchbox peanut butter & jelly sandwiches or for breakfast pan cakes with some African attitude.

McCartney, who encourages any and all opportunities "to think out side the box" approves wholeheartedly.

She doesn't like to talk about her sideline cookie business at school (can you imagine how many cookies she'd feel compelled to bake for her students?). But they wouldn't be too surprised, she says.

"Dancing and baking share similarities in that both involve a certain amount of improvisation and letting your imagination take control."

Self-described cookie freak Donna Chambers, who owns That Old Black Magic, an African-American gift shop in White Plains, says customers "are always pleasantly surprised, even kind of shocked" when they see the cookies on display at her Mamaroneck Avenue store.

"As for many things in this Afrocentric business, it's the first time they've seen a cookie shaped like a Djembe drum," she says. "At one time there was nothing to celebrate black history," she adds, "now we have everything from figurines to cookies." It helps sales, she says, to have McCartney's one-of-a-kind cookies displayed near the kits. "If you're a baker, the visuals make you want to jump out and bake," she says.

Ironically, McCartney was never considered much of a baker, which is why, she says, "my family is getting a big kick out of this."

Sure there was the occasional pumpkin loaf, and those gingerbread cookies she loved to make as a child. "even then," she says wagging her finger, "my gingerbread cookies were never shaped like boys."

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