DALLAS, Ga. — There's a special feeling that comes with the smell and taste of a freshly baked cookie, and it's that feeling that transformed a Georgia mom's quest to care for others into a growing cookie empire.
Kyri's Kookies marked the first brick and mortar location in early 2023 in Dallas, Georgia, but for Dr. Kyri Mosley, the journey started decades earlier, spending time with her grandmother in the kitchen.
"That's how I got my beginning," she shared with 11Alive as she prepared a batch of cookies. "Just watching."
What started as baking alongside her grandmother, turned in to a lifelong enjoyment of spreading happiness, Mosley said. And cookies, in particular, evoked a special feeling of home.
"Cookies remind me of grandma's baking," she said, a feeling she sought to spread as she was going through a difficult chapter of her own.
"In 2009, I had gone through a divorce," Mosley told 11Alive. "I remember feeling really abandoned at the time. I asked my son, hey do you want to make cookies with me?"
Mosley said she imagined soldiers abroad were likely feeling isolated, too, and in an effort to get out of her own head turned to shipping coolers full of cookies to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"This went on for years," Mosley said. "And just getting their feedback was encouraging because they would always tell me, 'Why aren't you doing this for the rest of the world? They need to taste your cookies,' and I was like 'That's never going to happen,'" she remembered with a laugh.
Despite the encouragement and prodding from her then 9-year-old son to start selling her creations, Mosley continued giving away her cookies instead. The gifts, she explained, were her thank yous, her encouragement to others, a comfort through life's ups and downs.
Then, in 2019, her own life took a devastating turn: Stage 4 Ewing Sarcoma.
"It was already in stage 4 so the prognosis was really poor," Mosley said. "There wasn't a lot of belief, because it had spread so much, that I would make it."
The treatment involved intense chemotherapy, at time nonstop 80-120 hours of infusion. Finally, she heard the word "remission," a moment that launched her life into a new chapter.
"The trauma of the diagnosis propelled me to say, 'This is your passion,'" she said. "This is what you love to do."
As a result, she left her medical career to start a new one, baking in shared Atlanta kitchen spaces, crafting her recipes to go all in on selling her cookies.
"It's loving. It's all love," her son Jordan, who once again bakes at her side in the kitchen, shared. "She's trying to support everybody."
More than a decade later from coolers of cookies, success has come for Kyri's Kookies. The brand gaining attention of national hotel chains and local families alike.
"Every time I think about it, I feel so humbled," Mosley shared through tears. "I feel like God has just really blessed the giving side of it and allowed me to do what I love."