Mt. Morris bakery serving up cicada cookies, ice cream for Morgantown festival
These chocolate chip cookies at Rising Creek Bakery are topped with sugar-roasted cicadas. The cookies and cicada ice cream will be for sale Saturday at the Cicada Festival in Morgantown, W.Va.
Rising Creek Bakery owner Jenny Bardwell sprinkles sugar on top of cicadas before roasting the insects. The cicadas were sourced from Morgantown.
Rising Creek Bakery owner Jenny Bardwell serves up freshly baked chocolate chip crunch cookies. The crunch is a cicada on top.
Rising Creek Bakery owner Jenny Bardwell peels the wings off cicadas before roasting them at the bakery in Mt. Morris on Thursday. Bardwell is prepping the cicadas for a festival in Morgantown on Saturday.
MT. MORRIS – Jenny Bardwell is serving up cookies and ice cream with a crunch.
The owner of Rising Creek Bakery in Perry Township is making the desserts with cicadas for Morgantown’s Magicicada Festival at West Virginia University that runs throughout the day Saturday.
“They’re so prolific right now,” she said. “I hope people aren’t getting grossed out and that they’re interested.”
Bardwell said when she heard about the festival, she wanted to participate. Her husband, Sandy Liebhold, is an entomologist and will be speaking at the festival earlier in the day. He’s eaten cicadas before, but she has not.
“I really need to try them,” she said. “Other cultures eat bugs, and these only come out every 17 years.”
Bardwell said a friend of hers collected a large zip-locked bag of cicadas in Morgantown for her and gave them to her this week. She put them in the freezer, but brought them out Thursday to start preparing for the festival.
On Thursday, she plucked the wings off the bugs and roasted them with sugar before baking one on top of each of the 100 chocolate chip cookies she’ll take to the festival.
“They don’t have too much flavor themselves, so you flavor them and add them to other things,” she said. “They’re high in protein and low in carbs and fats.”
The ice cream will be a caramel, butterscotch flavor with sponge candy around the top, forming a nest where a single cicada will sit on top.
Bardwell, who has owned the bakery for seven years, tried a special last weekend in her diner – an omelette with avocado and “a cicada crunch sprinkle.” Five people ordered it, she said.
The first part of the festival will include presentations from 9 a.m. to noon about cicadas from biologists and scientists, including Liebhold, at the Life Sciences Building on WVU’s downtown campus. The rest of the activities, which will include events and cicada-flavored foods, will be held from 1 to 4 p.m. at the lawn area of the Core Arboretum near the WVU Coliseum.
For more information about the Magicicada Festival, go online to www.tourmorgantown.com/events/magicicada-festival.