HUNTINGTON BEACH : Students Baking Cookies for Troops

A handful of Talbert Middle School students have been staying after school recently, but not as punishment for bad behavior.

Instead, Lorraine Leavitt’s two home economics classes spent their afternoons baking hundreds of applesauce cookies to send to troops in the Middle East.

“We could have been in their place,” said 12-year-old Melissa Avalos, a seventh-grader. “I feel sorry for them because they don’t have cookies or anything, and they’re probably going to be there a long time.”

Leavitt said the students voted to forgo making French toast and scrambled eggs for themselves to buy the ingredients for the cookies. Although some of the students did not want to give up their own goodies, the majority ruled, she said.

The cookies were baked with a special recipe to withstand the desert heat. Chocolate chips, for example, would become very messy, Leavitt said, and the cookies might disintegrate into a pile of crumbs by the time they made it overseas.

The cookies baked by the Talbert students contain no eggs and are dense. They are flavored with cinnamon, raisins and pecans.

“They are a very firm cookie,” Leavitt said. “Somebody said they’d make a good weapon.”

The students wrapped the cookies this week in cellophane wrap, placed them in plastic foam meat trays donated by a local supermarket and packed them in a large box.

The school’s student council has agreed to pay for mailing the cookies to Operation Cookie in La Mesa in San Diego County, which will forward them to the Persian Gulf.