Ellington

Bright School celebrates its 100th year in 2013, an occasion school officials decided requires far more than just a cake topped with 100 candles. Instead, the school set out to build the world’s largest cookie mosaic using 16,390 MoonPies.

An official adjudicator from the “Guinness Book of World Records” confirmed the 1,358.51-square-foot mosaic created by more than 300 students, teachers and faculty members Sept. 28-29 to be the world’s largest.

To be considered a mosaic, all adjoining cookies included in the giant rectangular design are required to touch each other, according to Kim Brown, director of advancement at Bright School.

“We wanted to do something memorable for the children,” she said, that adding the “Guinness Book of World Records” is one of the most frequently checked out books in the school library. “It was a great fit for elementary school-aged children.”

MoonPies were the school’s choice cookie for its birthday mosaic due to the connection with MoonPie creators the Campbell family, which sent several generations of children to the school, according to Brown.

While building the mosaic, students and faculty members followed all state and local health code regulations, such as building a cardboard structure to keep the cookies at least six inches from the floor, as well as keeping the builders’ hair, hands and feet covered.

“The main goal of course was to break the record, but we also didn’t want to waste food,” she said. “It was very important to us for the MoonPies to be edible, because we distributed all 16,000 cookies to a number of local agencies.”

The previous record holders in Hong Kong held their record for only a few days before Bright built its mosaic. The Hong Kong design was composed of Oreo cookies in celebration of that company’s centennial.

“We more than tripled the record,” said Brown of Bright’s mosaic, the school’s first world record in its 100-year existence.