Face on a cookie premiers in Chicago neighborhood candy store

We just passed Valentine’s Day, a day many people look at to celebrate romance. For Jill and John Manchester, it is an upcoming holiday (and an unlikely one) that was the start of their relationship that turned into 37 years of marriage and 14 years as co-owners of Windy City Sweets.
John and Jill Manchester both grew up on opposite ends of Nebraska. That’s like 400 miles from one another.
“I grew up where there are more cows than there were people,” Jill Manchester said.
But they both made the decision to attend the University of Nebraska. And that’s where they met. To call it by chance would not be accurate. Because to some degree John Manchester took chance and amplified it.
The way he tells the story, he was not necessarily a regular church attendee, but, on this particular spring day, he had chosen to go to service.
“I didn’t go to church a lot, but I happened to go to church because, when you are desperate, you go to church.”
A college student looking to find his way towards something, John Manchester would actually end up finding love.
He encountered the girlfriend of a friend at the service and she had brought her sorority sister, Jill. John was smitten. And he went about figuring out a way to see her again.
“We were trying to win some awards with public service and all this, so I convinced 80 guys that we should take sorority girls to Ash Wednesday mass,” John said of the plan he successfully hatched and sold to his fraternity brothers. “For Ash Wednesday, we went over and I did not know if I would even recognize her or if she would even go,” John Manchester said. “We went to church that night; that was day one.”
For Jill’s part, when the invitation came, she had actually already gone to mass that day. But, for a variety of reasons, she agreed to go again.
She remembers there being a long staircase lined with guys – the fraternity men – and one caught her eye.
“They brought you down the long staircase and there was just this line of guys and there was this cutest guy,” she said. “He had on the brightest purple pants.
“He talked the whole way to church, the whole way after.”
The two began dating and eventually took a trip to go to Taste of Chicago. And this is where Jill fell in love again – with a city.
They moved to New York for a time for a work commitment, but have been back in Chicago for 18 years. And the two own Windy City Sweets, which will have been in business for 42 years on March 1. The Manchesters bought the business in Dec. 2011.
In just a couple weeks, Windy City Sweets will once again be featured in the
“Everyone Wins Gift Bag on Hollywood’s Biggest Night.”
The gift bag will be given to each of the Oscar nominees and Windy City Sweets will be personalizing the gift.
About six months ago, Windy City Sweets began a process to put a likeness on a cookie. They will be doing this for the Oscar nominees. However, the cookies cannot feature movie stars likenesses without consent, so the company will include six cookies with the Hollywood star and each person’s name.
“Their likeness and their face are trademarked,” John Manchester said.
The stars also will get a certificate for them to get half a dozen complimentary cookies by sending in a photo for Windy City Sweets to use.
“Then the other thing that we are doing, that we are really giving them, is we will create a suite and a suite is six cookies,” John Manchester said. “They will have to provide a picture and we will put their image on it.”
The company will then send the suite of cookies wherever they request it be sent. Stars can send in a photo of anything they like, it does not have to be of themselves. For example, John Manchester said, the cookie can have the face of their child or someone in their family.
Windy City Sweets creates the cookies in only one flavor, but they put a lot of work into creating the right one.
“We’ve perfected kind of the ideal standard cookie,” John Manchester said.
The 3-inch vanilla sugar cookie is topped with extra sweet white frosting or icing and then the personalization can begin.
In addition to Hollywood stars, individual people have been taking advantage of the personalized cookies.
John remembers one particular family who personalized the cookie with a photo of their father jumping off a waterfall into the water.
“It was some of their best vacation pictures and some of their best memories,” he said.

Individual customers have ordered cookies for showers, weddings, anniversary or corporate events.

In addition to individuals, corporations also are ordering personalized cookies.

“It doesn’t matter if it's a logo or a photo or a picture of their face,” Manchester said of the personalization.
Customers can order personalized cookies for their at-home Oscar parties too. In fact, John Manchester said that customers can order their own names and “nominations” on a personalized Hollywood star cookie if they would like.
Windy City Sweets is not just personalizing on the individual end of things, but they also have businesses ordering personalized cookies.
Corporate gifting means the size of the order, with a logo on a cookie, for example, will be much larger.
“We’re in talks right now with a company of possibly doing 500 of them with their logo on it,” John Manchester said. “It’s a lot of work to do that, done with love of course.”
Windy City Sweets, whose website is windycitysweets.com, has added a new website just for the cookie craze – faceonacookie.com
Jill Manchester says the reaction of people when given a cookie is just the thing that John seeks out in everyday life.
“John’s mission is about spreading joy and this definitely does it,” Jill Manchester said.