Why Cookie Notes matters.
Cookie Notes by Shiri is a bespoke cottage bakery where West Los Angeles's residential character meets hand-decorated sugar cookies, personalized edible portraiture and founder Shiri Morgan's un crossover from clinical nutrition into cookie art.
Set within West Los Angeles near Exposition Boulevard and Bentley Avenue and just steps from the Expo Line corridor, the cottage bakery occupies a residential pocket between Sawtelle, Rancho Park and the commercial spine of Sepulveda Boulevard, with the Santa Monica Mountains defining the broader northern horizon beyond the Westside. Production occurs inside Morgan's home bakery, separating the business from the storefront model of conventional pastry shops. Custom orders form the primary encounter, with individually decorated sugar cookies commissioned around birthdays, weddings, baby showers, corporate events and personal milestones. Local pickup connects each finished set directly with its commissioner, and California shipping extends the work beyond Los Angeles. The result is a residential bakery where personalized design and tightly controlled production turn the sugar cookie into both dessert and an edible record of a particular person or occasion.
What defines Cookie Notes.
Cookie Notes is best known for Shiri Morgan's transformation from registered dietitian and diabetes educator into a custom cookie artist whose business grew directly from cookies made for her children. Morgan began decorating sugar cookies for their birthdays, then continued making them as gifts as friends repeatedly encouraged her to sell the designs. The response eventually pushed the hobby into a commercial cottage bakery carrying her first name as part of the brand. Her professional work in diabetes education continued alongside Cookie Notes, creating an unusual parallel career between clinical nutrition and decorative baking. Morgan developed the Ultimate Cookie Note as her most personal commission, gathering memories, anecdotes, inside jokes and biographical details from a recipient's friends and family before translating those references into separate cookie designs. An early paid commission came from Shane Goldsmith of the Liberty Hill Foundation, who ordered cookies for a board retreat and became one of the friends encouraging Morgan's move into commercial baking. The studio has subsequently produced work for private celebrations and corporate commissions, including cookies created for Gorillaz around the band's February 2026 Hollywood Palladium presentation of The Mountain.
Original Vanilla Amaretto gives the signature sugar cookie its flavor foundation, with almond extract carried into the royal icing that receives Morgan's decorative work. Vanilla Brown Sugar shifts the dough toward deeper caramelized sweetness, and Vanilla Orange Cardamom combines citrus with the aromatic warmth of the spice. Royal icing supplies the hard-setting surface required for the detailed imagery, lettering and layered decoration central to custom sets, making the finish structurally important to the artwork as well as the cookie. Printed designs create another branch of the repertoire through photographs, logos and sentiments, with the six-cookie Polaroid Gift Set turning personal images into a coordinated edible composition. Miniatures can accompany standard-size cookies, giving larger commissions changes in scale without abandoning the visual theme connecting the set. Morgan requires creative control over commissioned designs after receiving invitations, photographs, logos and other visual references, allowing those source elements to be translated into a unified set.
How Cookie Notes fits.
Cookie Notes works as the anchor for an outing connecting a neighborhood park shaped by early Sawtelle civic organizations with a national cemetery rooted in post-Civil War veterans care and an archive created to rescue the material culture disappearing after the Cold War.
Begin at Stoner Recreation Center, whose ground originated with a 1925 Los Angeles Playground Commission purchase after Sawtelle businessman Walter Armacost had advocated for a substantial community playground. Baseball inaugurated the park in 1926, and a campaign begun by the West Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce in 1929 subsequently produced a swimming pool and community building. Their July 22, 1931 dedication included the Presidents' Memorial Grove, assembled through trees donated by 36 local civic, religious, social and veterans organizations, with the Japanese Floral Association contributing shrubbery and landscaping around the new complex. Many of those mature trees survive within the park. Continue to Los Angeles National Cemetery, established in 1889 on 20 acres of the Pacific Branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers. Mexican War veteran Abner Prather became its first interment, and expansion eventually produced a 114-acre landscape containing more than 85,000 interments. Five Civil War Medal of Honor recipients rest there, and a 27-foot granite obelisk honors veterans collectively. A cast-zinc Union soldier originally crowned an 1896 water fountain on the veterans campus before moving to the cemetery after the fountain disappeared in the 1940s. Conclude at Wende Museum, founded in 2002 by Los Angeles historian Justinian Jampol after political change in Eastern Europe left vast quantities of Cold War material vulnerable to dispersal and destruction. Jampol assembled paintings, furniture, textiles, scrapbooks, menus and other remnants into a collection exceeding 100,000 objects. Culver City granted the institution a 75-year lease on a decommissioned 1949 National Guard Armory in 2012, and the renovated museum opened there in November 2017. The former military building now houses material from the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, joined outside by an East German guardhouse once used by the German Democratic Republic's state news agency. The progression moves from community institutions created by early West Los Angeles residents through a landscape preserving the lives of American veterans and culminates inside a Cold War armory repurposed to preserve objects left behind by vanished political systems.
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