Submitted Photo Tammy Gillmore, a cookie baker from Minot, delivers, on Monday, 156 dozen cookies she made for the Team Minot Cookie Drive to the Minot Area Chamber EDC Office. The cookies will go to young airmen living in dorms at Minot Air Force Base. This is Gillmore’s 15th year of baking cookies for the cookie drive.

Tammy Gillmore of Minot is in her 15th year of baking cookies for airmen at Minot Air Force Base.

On Monday, when Gillmore delivered her cookies to the Minot Area Chamber EDC Office, the drop off site for the cookies in Minot, she had a new record for the number of cookies she baked and delivered for the cookie drive. Gillmore’s baking feat for this year’s cookie drive came to 156 dozen cookies of 35 different flavors.

Gillmore, who has been baking and donating cookies to the annual cookie drive for airmen since 2009, said, in a December 2023 story in The Minot Daily News, “I actually had no idea about this program until a former co-worker asked me if I baked for our service men and women. When I told her I haven’t, she brought in the newspaper. I realized this is something easy for me to do. I’ve been baking every year since.”

The cookies go to young airmen who live in dorms at the base. Many of them have never been away from home before.

Gillmore said she starts baking the cookies several weeks prior to the annual drive.

Although she does all the baking herself, Gillmore said she has some help with the project. She said Craig Heupel of Marketplace Foods donated cookie trays both last year and this year, and Lee Weltikol of Heritage Repair and Alignment donated $200 to help her with supplies.

Gillmore’s cookie donation and other cookie donations are packaged at the base and then delivered to the young airmen.