A sugar cookie changed everything in Jasmine Cho’s life. It was simple — its surface covered in smooth white icing, and a portrait of a protestor piped with a delicate tip.

She’d been making portrait cookies for a while: figures like Grace Lee Boggs, Yuri Kochiyama, astronauts, authors, changemakers she’d admired from afar. She even hand-delivered a cookie to Hines Ward, the Korean American NFL star celebrated on and off the field.“That was fun,” Cho tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “It was a cool experience.”

But the cookie that truly galvanized her practice wasn’t for someone famous. It was for someone she didn’t even know.

It was summer 2017, and Cho was preparing a solo show at Biddle’s Escape, a neighborhood café in Pittsburgh’s Regent Square. She had decided to focus on activists, both past and present. One night, scrolling Instagram, she came across a photo that stopped her in her tracks.

Ben Dumond, a Korean American activist, was holding a protest sign that listed his intersecting identities: “I am Korean American. I am gay. I am a rape survivor. I am still standing strong.”

Cho spent hours piping his likeness onto a sugar cookie.

“That was the first portrait I did that really made me realize how serious this work actually is,” she says. “Cookies can feel very disarming and light-hearted, but actually, when I’m doing these portraits, they are not a fast process to create. I have to be really slow and intentional.”

From that moment on, she knew this wasn’t just about cookies anymore. If it ever was.

Long before she became known as a “cookie activist,” Jasmine Cho was just a Korean American kid in 1980s L.A., fielding the same baffling question on repeat: “People would ask if I was Chinese or Japanese,” she says. “And when I said no, they’d go, ‘Well, what are you then?’

“Korea just wasn’t on people’s radar.”

Cho was raised by her Korean immigrant parents, as well as her paternal grandmother. Even in one of the most diverse cities in the country, she rarely saw her identity reflected or recognized. “I make the distinction of saying Korea because my grandmother lived through colonization, before South and North Korea were divided,” she explains.

Her earliest connection to identity was shaped by both pride and erasure. She grew up thinking certain words she’d learned from her grandmother were Korean, until she later discovered they were Japanese. The small linguistic betrayal opened yet another door to understanding her own identity more deeply.

“That’s when I also started to learn about how the imperialist government of Japan had colonized Korea,” she says. “So that’s another element in terms of my cultural identity.”

Her family later moved to Albuquerque, N.M., where being the only Asian kid in class made her even more aware of her otherness. The first time she was called a racial slur was in preschool.

At school, Asian American history was nowhere to be found. “The only history I learned that felt remotely close was about the Civil Rights Movement and Black leaders,” she says. “I related to that because I knew what it felt like to be minoritized.”

Art became her first outlet. She sketched pop stars from Korean magazines, gravitating toward faces and expressions. Baking followed later, when a friend taught her how to bake from scratch in high school. From then on, she dreamed of opening a café. In college, she became known for her Nutella roll cakes and community bake sales.

Cho came to Pittsburgh to study pharmacy at Duquesne University. But like many creative spirits, academia didn’t stick the first time around. “A rollercoaster,” she says of her early college years. She paused, started again, paused again; until she landed at Chatham University, where she took a 2011 Maymester course titled Asian Immigrant Experiences in Pittsburgh taught by Professor Pooja Rishi.

That course cracked something wide open in her, she says.

“I felt everything at once. Anger that it took so long to learn this history, but also a sense of liberation. I realized we weren’t minorities. We had been minoritized in this country.”

It took another few years, and one very unexpected commission, for her activism to find its voice. In 2016, a friend asked her to make cookies for a birthday party — portrait cookies of their face.

“The cookies went viral. This was before TikTok, just on Facebook and Instagram. Everyone was paying attention,” she says. “So I thought, if people are going to look at my cookies, whose faces do I want them to see?”

She began creating cookies of Asian Americans and Pittsburghers she admired but didn’t see represented, like food activist Leah Lizarondo, co-founder of 412 Food Rescue actress Ming-Na Wen, orthopedic legend Dr. Freddie Fu, and Hines Ward.

“Leah is someone I consider a long-distance mentor. She’s just going to be a mentor in my heart forever.”

In 2019, Cho gave a TEDx talk at Pittsburgh’s Byham Theater to a sold-out crowd of 900. “It was amazing to speak in front of that many people,” she says. “But after it went online, I didn’t think much of it, until the views started climbing. Thousands. Then tens of thousands.”

Soon, media outlets like CBS This Morning and NPR came calling. But the messages that stuck with her most weren’t from journalists, they were from strangers around the world.

“I thought my message was about Asian Americans,” Cho says. “But I heard from people in Pakistan, China, Greece — people who just understood what it felt like to be unseen, to be erased. It was incredible.”

By 2017, Cho was running her small baking business, Yummyholic, alone, and burning out. “Managing a business on your own is a lot,” she says. “But I noticed that even when I was stressed, being in the kitchen calmed me. That’s when I started wondering, is ‘bake therapy’ a thing?”

She Googled it. Nothing came up. The closest term was “expressive therapy.” So Cho enrolled at Carlow University and graduated in 2019 with a degree in art therapy, summa cum laude, and the first in her family to graduate college.

Supervised by Dr. Jennifer Roth and Dr. Beth Surlow, she led an interdisciplinary research study through Center for Victims measuring the effect of baking on stress and anxiety. Participants filled out questionnaires and gave saliva samples before and after baking. The results? Lower self-reported anxiety and reduced cortisol levels.

“I know baking isn’t therapeutic for everyone, some people find it stressful,” she says. “But it can be healing for a lot of people. I just want to expand how we think about wellness and offer one more path to empowerment.”

In 2020, the City of Pittsburgh officially declared January 28 “Jasmine Cho Day.” “It was surreal,” she says. “Part of me felt undeserving, like, I’m just a baker. But I know the power of representation. If someone sees this and feels encouraged, then that makes it worth it.”

That same year, Cho wrote and self-published her first children’s book: Role Models Who Look Like Me: Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Who Made History. Originally a final project for a Carlow class, it features 14 AAPI trailblazers and ends with a family portrait. “It’s a reminder that even if you didn’t see yourself in history books, your story matters, and your roots run deep.”

On May 30, Cho will present Eum Yang: Sweetness & Strength as part of 1Hood’s Artivist Academy Showcase. The evening includes an artist talk and a Tae Kwon Do demonstration in honor of her father, Grandmaster He Il Cho.

He Il Cho helped introduce Tae Kwon Do to the U.S. “He’s the most influential role model in my life,” she says.

Lately, Cho’s been reimagining her own creative form. For the last few years, life pulled her away from the kitchen. “It felt like a whirlwind of relentless challenges that capped my creativity,” she says. But now? “I’m thrilled, grateful, euphoric. This unexpected and welcome transition is happening.”

The transition isn’t just metaphorical. Cho just found a brand new stage for her creations: a sunny storefront on Chislett Street in Morningside, nestled beside Firecracker Fabrics and Ka-Fair Cafe.

“This feels like that dream finally materializing 25 years later,” she said, adding that it was as much a homecoming as a business move. “It’s been my dream to have my own bakery café space since I first fell in love with baking as a sophomore in high school.”

She hopes to reopen for custom orders by late summer or early fall, starting with pop-ups and collaborations. First up? Joymakase, a multi-sensory tasting and listening series with her fiancé, Jordan Taylor (aka Council of Saturn), inspired by Korean ballads and her mother’s memories. Cho will bake one treat for each track on the album Passed Memories.

“It’s inspired by omakase,” she says, “but instead of sushi, it’s joy. Curated joy.”

She plans to open slowly, starting with pop-ups and collaborations. “I’ve kind of pigeonholed myself with just sugar cookies, and I want to play again. Try new things.”

More than anything, she hopes the space becomes fertile ground. “Everything I do is about visibility,” she says. “I want my work to be soil for others to bloom.”