Bakes from Heaven

"It ended up there's a huge audience for graveTok (graveyard TikTok videos) and cemetery TikTok."I found this beautiful gravestone for Naomi Miller-Dawson. It's designed like an open book and featured a recipe for spritz cookies, which are made using a cookie press.

There are many sides to TikTok – from true crime to dancing to cooking. Some TikTok accounts are quirky, like Rosie Grant's, an intersection of two very different niches: baking and graveyards.

It began as a graduate school assignment. She was enrolled in the University of Maryland's library science program when she was given the unusual task of creating a brand-new TikTok page for a class on content creation.

Inspired by the internship she had at the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C, Rosie started baking the recipes that people write on their gravestones on her TikTok account, @ghostlyarchive.

Rosie Grant creates the recipes that people engrave on their gravestones, such as the aforementioned recipe for spritz cookies at Naomi Miller-Dawson's grave. Rosie Grant: "I tried it out, posted it on TikTok, and it kind of exploded in a way that was very surprising."She continued, "So I found more and just kept doing it."

Grant began looking for additional videos after that first one went viral, and viewers began sending her pictures of family gravestones with recipes on them.

A lot of people say what they'd want on their own gravestones. Certain individuals have been like macintosh and cheddar. Taco Bell Crunchwrap Supreme was one example."All of the recipes have been very different, and it's endlessly fascinating," Grant stated.

She stated, "It's not like oh, everyone has a cheesecake recipe."Every grave has been slightly distinct from the others. It's so cool."

From fudge to meatloaf, Rosie Grant has made 17 gravestone recipes. On her TikTok account, Rosie Grant Grant has amassed 116,100 followers and 4.7 million likes. She said that TikTok gives people a way to remember loved ones who have passed away. In addition, many individuals can relate to her page despite the fact that graveyards and baking are two niches that you might not expect to coincide.

'Over My Dead Body' - like literally

Social media users in 2022 shared a picture of a headstone with a recipe for cookies and the text that the person who was buried there had promised, "You'll get my cookie recipe over my dead body!"

With the caption "Backside of Mom's gravestone," the image was shared as a humorous meme. She would respond, "Over my dead body!" whenever someone inquired about her cookie recipe. This screenshot depicts the meme

So, was it true that the mother from Cascade, Iowa, kept her secret cookie recipe a secret and promised to only share it "over my dead body"?

The photo of the gravestone is genuine, yet the story purportedly behind it, as expressed in the image above, isn't.

The Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, a newspaper based in Iowa, quoted the loved ones of Maxine Menster, who passed away in September 1994, in a brief article that appeared in December 2012. Jane Menster, her daughter, told the newspaper that she and her father decided that the cookie recipe was the best way to remember her mother's generosity. But the fact that the recipe was kept a secret until she died was not mentioned in the article.

"It was never kept a secret, The headstone recipe was a sentimental thing that my father and I did." Jane Menster told another local newspaper, The Gazette.

The Gazette article included the recipe so that anyone could make the cookies:

"Mom's Christmas Cookies"

Cream:

--1 cup sugar

--1/2 cup oleo

Add:

--2 beaten eggs

--1 tsp. vanilla

Add:

--3 cups flour

--3 tsp. baking powder

--1 tsp. salt

Add alternately with 1 cup cream. Chill and roll out with flour. Bake in a 350-degree oven, and frost.