Hillary Clinton shocked the country in 1992 when she said she "could have stayed home and baked cookies," [3] but she chose to pursue her law career instead. This statement inspired Family Circle, a food and family magazine with 16 million monthly readers, to throw a First Lady Cookie Competition [4]. The wives of each presidential candidate submitted an original recipe to be baked by magazine subscribers and eventually voted on for a winner. It was a widespread success, and the magazine has made it a tradition. It's something many avid American bakers look forward to each election, including myself! With Hillary Clinton running as president in 2016, this year's cookie competition is posing to be a little awkward — that is, unless you know the history behind the competition.

Rather than pitting Melania Trump against Bill Clinton, the magazine opted to rename the cookie-off as well as Hillary Clinton's recipe to something more gender neutral: the Presidential Cookie Poll [5] and Clinton Family's Chocolate Chip Cookies [6]. Perhaps Family Circle made the conscious decision to not include Mr. Clinton in the competition after Huffington Post exposed his oatmeal cookie recipe [7], submitted in the 2008 Presidential Bake-Off, as a direct copy from the Betty Crocker Cookbook. Talk about troublesome!

As a result, this year's contenders are Melania Trump's Star Cookies [8], a sugar cutout cookie enriched with egg yolk and sour cream, and Clinton Family's Chocolate Chip Cookies [9], an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie that Hillary submitted in the '92 and '96 First Lady Cookie Competitions [10]. If it's making a comeback for the third time, it must be that good.

While I'm disappointed Bill Clinton didn't directly participate in this year's cookie competition, I have a work-around. In 2012, I tried both Ann Romney and Michelle Obama's cookies [11] and even created a bipartisan cookie, meshing the two recipes together. I'm thinking Bill Clinton star balloon [12] cookies are in order . . .