Add a little fun and excitement to your life by celebrating Fortune Cookie Day. These engaging biscuits always have a suitably general clairvoyant message inside which normally promises good health, luck, or fortune to the recipient. It’s always nice to get an assurance of pleasant things to come, so a Fortune Cookie or two is just the thing to provide an intriguing and delightful break in the day.

Fortune cookies are sweet biscuits that are a folded circular shape, and they have a paper slip inside, that typically contains a message, which is revealed once the cookie is broken in half. A whopping 3 billion fortune cookies are made each year, and a machine called the Kitamura FCM-8006W can turn out 8,000 in an hour.

There are numerous ways of marking Fortune Cookie Day. Perhaps the most obvious is to treat friends or family to a delicious Chinese meal, with the final course consisting of a plate of Fortune Cookies. Why not buy some Fortune Cookies as a pleasant surprise for colleagues or friends? If you’re watching your weight and worry about the calories in these snacks, you can always go online to find virtual Fortune Cookies which will give you your destiny without the added fat!

The exact origin of fortune cookies is unclear, though various immigrant groups in California claim to have popularized them in the early 20th century. They most likely originated from cookies made by Japanese immigrants to the United States in the late 19th or early 20th century.

Some 3 billion fortune cookies are made each year, almost all in the United States. But the crisp cookies wrapped around enigmatic sayings have spread around the world. They are served in Chinese restaurants in Britain, Mexico, Italy, France, and elsewhere. In India, they taste more like butter cookies. A surprisingly high number of winning tickets in Brazil’s national lottery in 2004 were traced to lucky numbers from fortune cookies distributed by a Chinese restaurant chain called Chinatown. But there is one place where fortune cookies are conspicuously absent: China.

Fortune cookies didn’t make their way to China until 1989, and they were sold as “genuine American fortune cookies,” believe it or not. Another company tried to get in on the action in 1992, but they gave up due to lack of sales. Nowadays they’re all but nonexistent there.

Fortune cookies were initially known as ‘fortune tea cookies’ in the United States, until around the time of World War II.

There’s a unique flavor in fortune cookies, and it’s from a combination of vanilla and sesame oil. You know how when you take cookies out of the oven they’re still soft? Same with fortune cookies. They start their life as simple round cookies, then they’re folded around the fortune. You know how when you take cookies out of the oven they’re still soft? Same with fortune cookies. They start their life as simple round cookies, then they’re folded around the fortune.

Each fortune cookie is only 107 calories. There’s also a little under 1 gram of fat, 1 milligram of cholesterol, 24 grams of carbohydrates, and 13 grams of sugar in each cookie.