Valentine’s Day at Apprentice: Cookies Galore

Happy Valentine’s Day from our virtual office to yours! Never ones to shy away from sugar, we celebrated the holiday with a virtual cookie decorating session hosted by the fabulous Baked by Melissa.

Do our cookie garnishing skills match our prowess for perfecting MES software? Read on to find out!

Challenge #1: Freehand Cookie Artistry

Our cookie expert Melissa kicked things off by inviting us to pick any of the unfrosted cookies in our kit, then go to town by making it our own!

Armed with buttercream frosting and sprinkles in every shape and size, we set out on our journey to embrace our inner artists:

Challenge #2: Mystery Cookies

Next, Melissa ramped things up a notch with a mystery cookie challenge. Our team split up into a half dozen mini groups to brainstorm and execute a separate unique cookie idea for each team.

So what types of cookie did we create for this mystery challenge? 

It turns out great minds decorate alike... Literally every group had the same excellent idea: recreating our Apprentice logo in cookie form!

Challenge #3: Themed Hobby Cookies

For our next challenge, we broke out into new groups to create cookies that reflected a different hobby shared by each group. Apprentices served up a wide array of edible hobbies, from videography:

To wildlife:

To music:

To reading!

Props to our VP of Customer Accounts and Chief Futurist Frank Maggiore for the above... I've never seen purple prose look so appetizing.

Cameos From the Tiny Tots of Apprentice

One of the highlights of our cookie adventure was getting to see some of the little helpers joining our activity to help out Mom and Dad and provide some much-needed cookie taste tests.

What these kiddos lacked in precision filigree, they made up for in adorability. And they clearly had their priorities straight on whether or not to eat icing straight from the piping bags:

Bonus Cookie Close-Ups

Still scrolling, or have you made a detour to the kitchen for some snacks? If you’ve got an appetite for more of our cookie artistry, we’ve got you covered:

Closing Thoughts: Team Building in the Time of COVID

Whether your canvas is a cookie, a website, or the whole wide world, virtual team-building events make space for those water cooler chats that are all too rare these days.

As we continue to adjust to the “new normal” of remote work life, it’s not always easy to find ways to keep our teams connected. That’s why we make a point to prioritize team building activities here at Apprentice (okay, the delicious calories were a huge motivator as well).

But in all seriousness, taking an hour out of our day to collaborate on cookie decorating really helped to bring our network of remote offices closer together.

We got a chance to show off our buttercream calligraphy, experiment with sprinkles, chat about our hobbies, and introduce our teammates to our kids and pets. A very valuable Valentine's Day indeed!

Want to join our growing team of expert bakers/passionate problem solvers who are changing the future of medicine? Check out our open positions.

No matter how busy we get launching platform updates and perfecting our documentation, we always make time for each other here at Apprentice. And that’s just how the cookie crumbles.