Belgium Gives the U.S. a Life-Sized Cookie of Obama Holding a Basketball

A baker in Belgium made a life-sized cookie depicting President Obama wearing a "USA" sweatshirt and holding a basketball. That should certainly help the country get over that whole racist-caricatures-in-the-newspaper thing that happened over the weekend.

Radio station Radio 1 tweeted a picture of the cookie, which is made of gingerbread, being handed over the the US Embassy in Brussels. The man at right is Mark Storella, deputy chief of mission. And that quote is from Storella, "There's been quite bit of Transatlantic dialogue on this cookie." We don't really know what that means.

Another view:

The guy at left in the top photo is one of the Radio 1 personalities that inspired the gift, such as it is. In February, with Obama's trip to Europe still far in the future, the radio show "Fallow" decided that a giant gingerbread cookie would make a fitting gift. They contacted Willy Van Oers, a cookie-maker from Essen, who made the thing. According to Google Translate's Dutch-to-English translation, Van Oers was happy to provide the service. "It must be good because my international reputation is at stake. The hardest thing for me is making the face recognizable that I will die cutting, inch by inch." We assume that's meant to be die-cutting. (There are more pictures here, including of the still-living Van Oers.)

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Is the face recognizable? Well, sort of. More so than the image at right below, which appeared in a Belgian paper over the weekend.

The accompanying article was meant as satire, which obviously didn't come across. (Also: hmm.) The paper apologized.

The cookie went over better, despite being a life-sized image of America's first black president in sports gear, holding a basketball. The first response to Radio 1's tweeted photo offers some good advice.

Yeah, maybe.

This article was originally published at http://www.thewire.com/politics/2014/03/belgium-gives-the-us-a-life-sized-cookie-of-obama-holding-a-basketball/359582/

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