Sweet Pea: Vegan Bike Commuters

In the thick of the bike commute challenge, "Emerick Architects" were head to head with "Sweet Pea Bakery". When Sweet Pea advertised 50 cent coffees to anyone who showed up on bike, we decided to play the intimidation card. Five meat eating architects stormed into the vegan paradise, ordered up a slough of sweets, got their free coffees, and sat down. The chick at the cash registered called out the bill and an (unamed) architect slammed down the company plastic. A shiny "Emerick" blazed into her eyes. Take that Sweet Pea.


One of the selected nibblies was a vegan cookie concoction. How to describe... Think Oreo. Now make that 10 times the size of the iconic sandwich cookie. Then make the cream in the middle chocolatey junk. Cast a little spell so those chocolate wafers become oatmeal, peanut butter, and raisined out yummy monsters. And then, my friend, you are just about there.

The verdict: Even minus all the critical ingredients of a cookie, this one tastes pretty damn delish. So much so, that I don't want to know how these vegans do it. I'll just imagine it to be magic, rather than strange roots, figs, and the oil of a pomegranate.

PS- Sweet Pea are good people, serve up good things, and are good components in bike challenges. Many thanks! (We were both later robbed of our ranks by teams that emerged from nowhere and wore sheik all black scenester garb.)

Cow Chips at Pike Place Market

Adages, or Things I Know to be True:
-Washington State has GOOD cookies.
-When in Seattle, Pike Place Market is great for cookie questing.
-"Cow Chips" are better than Buffalo Chips.
-"Cow Chips" are way better than Cowboy Cookies.
-"Cow Chips" may be better than Cowboys...
-"Cow Chips" are not cow pies, so you are safe to eat them.





These cookies are tasty and have a sense of humor.

Floyd's, or Nuvrei: Double Chocolate Chip

This one came about via an architecture quest. We were out measuring a couple buildings in Old Town following a major 16 hour deadline crunch day. Feeling a little worse for the wear, we needed a lil' something to recharge the batteries. Then there was "Floyd's." It may be a well known fact that coffee and cookies are like peas and carrots, but Floyd's on NW Couch really does this combo well. Stumptown coffee + Nuvrei pastries + great cookie eating ambiance = Awake + Extremely Happy.

About the cookie: mmm... I've never seen one quite like this. Two types of chocolate drops- milk chocolate and dark chocolate- swimming in the yummy cookieness. Yes, you heard right, these are no chips. About the size of a dime or quarter in some cases, they are definitely drops. Even better, they taste delicious. ( On another occasion, I thought I could swear that the milk chocolate drop tasted a bit like a latte.) Anyway, this keen attention to good chocolate and the overall texture of this cookie makes it one of my faves in Portland. It may be a little too bland in its sweetness to be as happily consumed alone as it is with coffee so get yourself a big cup. Floyd's you are my winter hibernation plan.

Delphina's: Perfecto Pecan Sandy

My questing for a good cookie lead me to the San Juan Islands and good cookie I did find. In fact, this is the best cookie yet.

I found her at the local Farmer's Market in Friday Harbor amongst croissants and a greedy contigent of island cookie monsters. I believe the stand said "Delphina's Bakery." What a hit this place must be. The line is long everyone is loading up with enough pastries to weather a winter storm let alone the next week. The woman in front of me buys five cookies snatching up the last of the double chocolate chips that I had been eyeing. So instead I must go with a pecan sandy. Dishing the cookie into the bag, the man tells me this is a "Christmas Cookie". After a bite, I think if that is true, then it needs to be Christmas every day. This cookie is amazingly tasty- light in texture, a delicate nuttyness, and it just perfectly melts in the mouth. While, it is a long distance to travel for a cookie, part of me believes the pilgrimage is worth it. Heck, you get to see Orcas along the way.

Pearl Bakery: Pretty Peanut Butter

Pearl Bakery is the first featured true bakery with all the ambiance of one. High ceilings, a spotlessness, lots of breads and baked temptations lined up on cookie sheets, and a friendly staff eager to help fill you with caffeine and sugar. It comes as no surprise their cookies are gorgeous. This one was quite the knock out- see for yourself:


Need we define what makes this one a real beauty? OK.
1. A stellar shade of blonde. You know what you are getting, no disguises. PeanutBUTTER.
2. A natural shape. No perfectly engineered and stamped out cookie. Circular with some juts and jives.
3. Depth. A sweet foreshadowing of a delicious chewy texture.
4. Simple adornment. The fork press pattern weaves into the natural crumble of baking. Sugar crystals decorate the top edge.


This cookie is way to pretty to taste that good, right? Sadly, it is so. While is delicately sweet, it doesn't scream peanut butter to my taste buds. I love Pearl Bakery Cookies. This may not my favorite, but you can tell it was made with love. The chocolate chip is tastier and has a nice orange zing tucked away against the morsels. Go with that one.

Moral of the story: sometimes you gotta try 'em all to find the good ones.

Morningstar: Quarterpounder or Chocolate Chip?

This must be the cookie equivalent of the quarterpounder. Look up “huge” in the dictionary, and this is what you find.

Morningstar is a tasty little lunch stop in the thick of downtown. The sandwiches are quite delish- mostly turkeys with different shades of cream cheese. (I'm a fan of the "Sophie's extra special). In fact they are so yumbo, you eat the whole thing before seeing the cookie. This spells T-R-O-U-B-L-E to my sense of self control, ie. lack there of.

OK, so this cookie is not the gut bomb of the Eugene Monster but it tastes a little too much like the Pillsbury “you bake” cookies to be at the top of my cookie list. And the chips are nowhere near the fudgy yum factor of Elephant's. My apologies. They probably make these guys by scratch onsite with Nestle's Tollhouse morsels. But I think in the future I will stick to the sandwiches.

I am off to run very far, or at least several times around the block to snap some photos. Check this out for now:

http://www.morningstarcafe.com/

Elephant's Deli: where have all the cowboy's gone?

Every good yuppie loves Elephant's Deli. In the world of the product related lunch and learns, if the sale's rep mentions Elephant's they have full license to make the pitch, even if it's on low voltage lightbulb's. Everything about this place is snazzy. Backlit refrigeration bins with plastic wrapped sandwiches and salads; a lunch counter where panini are prepped, and every version of fancy bottled water you can imagine. Heck, they even sell the gourmet chocolate covered peanuts that come from my grandmother's rural Virginia town, population 300. This little bit of hometown America convinces me that they must have good cookies.

Elephant's cookies, arranged neatly on parchment and lacy doilies, catch your eye when you first walk into the door. They are all the exact same size and shape, as if delicately engineered. Given the preciseness of it all, when I happen across the cowboy cookie, and I can't say no. Maybe it's the mystique, an idea of a ruggedness or a masculinity, or just the irony. In any case, this cookie is handsome and just the right size. I take a big bite. Mother's don't let their babies grow up to be cowboy's... Unless they are this one. Definitely a bit boring. It does have a nice chewiness and a good oat grit, but little else to bolster it into the realm of spurs and bulls. What is this cowboy? In simpler terms, it is just an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie. The best part are the fudgy milk chocolate chips, of which it has ample amounts. But this is the only sparkle a girl is gonna get. Don't get me wrong, if you have the cash to spend and need a cookie, this one is dandy. The name is just misleading. Let's call it stock broker cookie.

After doing some basic research, I learn the real qualities of the Cowboy Cookie and realize mine, clearly, fell short. First, it needs nuts and lots of them. Two kinds, in fact. Pecans AND coconut. Then, throw in a bit of spice to give 'em a real kick. Now that sounds more like it. Here is how you can make a real Cowboy Cookie brought to you by no one other than the first lady of cow country, Laura Bush. Ha! http://www.wchstv.com/gmarecipes/laurabushcowboycookies.shtml

Ruby Jewel: Cookie Meets Perfect Friend

Summer heat requires a touch of cool and this next cookie fills the bill. Straight from a kitchen in NE Portland hails the Ruby Jewel, delicious icecream cookiewiches that even "lactards" like me find difficult to resist. Mine called to me from a freezer at New Seasons, but they are also available at Freddies, Whole Foods & other places we Portlanders enjoy frequenting like the Farmer's Market or Last Thursday on Alberta.

On this particular occasion, I chose the double chocolate chip cookie with peanut butter icecream. I have long thought how icecream and cookies must be like the perfect marriage. The same can be said of peanut butter and chocolate. So its no surprise that these Portland treats do it so well. Thinner chocolate cookies with a strong and individual flavor of their own surrounding a premium peanut buttery icecream. A nice mix of savory and sweet, antioxidants and protein, crunchy and soft. Best part: I love how the cookie kinda melts into the ice cream and vice versa. The summer version of why we dip fresh from the oven cookies into milk at other times of the year.

My thoughts: these put Reesus Peanut Butter Cups to shame

For more info: http://www.rubyjewel.net/index.php
Ruby Jewels are also made with a social conscience, use organic ingredients, and come in awesome unconventional flavors. Sounds quintessentially PDX? Summer Project: make your way through 'em all. Do it with friends and consider it "community service." I have also tried the much loved Lemon Cookie with Honey Lavendar Icecream and found it dainty and divine. It is a good compliment for sitting under a tree watching the flowers grow.

Attack of the Eugene Monster Cookie

This past weekend I traded the Portland urban "hip" for the Eugene country fair "hippie". Down in the land of stardust, rainbows, people on stilts with strange french accents, and infants dangling from painted breasts, I stumbled across an old stand-by. Originally, I had hoped to find a magical cookie baked by hand. But when cookie time rolled around, I saw a sign that read "Cookie Monster". Yes, my favorite character of all time lured me over. It turned out to the be the Eugene "Monster Cookie" in six classic varieties: chocolate chip, oatmeal chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, snickerdoodle, M&M, and peanut butter chocolate chip.

These Monster Cookies were a staple that got me through grad school. Best described as a meal, the monster cookie is about the size of a big grapefruit and it is one dense gorilla of a cookie. I consider it the type of thing you choose when you need a real cookie fix and nothing else will do. You've eaten a couple oreos and still aren't satisfied or you just broke up with your lover. It would also be pretty good if you had just returned to civilization after being stranded on a desert island for weeks and were starving. It is that type o cookie.

While capable of pulling you out of a ditch, the "Monster Cookie" sits like a lead weight on the tummy. As a result, after eating it you feel as though you have gained 50 pounds. If you ate the whole thing, you will still feel like this after 3 hours. My guess for this is because they are made with margarine or the like rather than real butter. But let's talk about the positive features. These cookies have a pretty groovy texture- chewy, slightly raw in feel. I also like them, because they seem to have a bit of salt. This is an especially good thing about the oatmeal raisin version. It gives the oatmeal grains a potato chip quality that blends nicely with the sweetness of the raisins.

On this particular day I went with the peanut butter chocolate chip. I was feeling stressed out by the crowd of people surrounding me, so this was a good release. While I like the texture, consistency, and feel of this cookie, the flavor fell a little short. More peanut butter and choco chips would have been great. Overall, it may have mollified whatever Eugene nostalgia I was feeling, but the gut bomb it placed in my belly made it difficult to properly enjoy the Country Fair.

Moral of the Story: always hold out for good cookies. Never fall prey to cookie monster motifs or fond memories, alone. And if you find youself at the Country Fair, look for the place that sells the cookies fresh from the oven.

Chocolate Chip Ginger Molasses Love & Shakespeare

No classic stroll into a beloved bakery brought these cookies to me. Rather they were an unconventional find and I am a little concerned, this being my first post, that this story may not be topped. But it went something like this...

On Summer evenings, there is a little theatre troupe that performs the plays of Shakespeare in Portland's parks. I had gathered with friends, wine, cheese, and fresh veggies to sit under the St John's Bridge and see "King Lear". Quickly, I found myself very distracted by a certain ziplock bag filled with fresh baked delicacies. Who has time to worry about Cordelia's excommunication when you have to consider who is going to tap this yummy resource first? And with the rustling of plastic, my thoughts immediately turned away from the naughty puns of Shakespeare and to the bag's contents. Thank you Katie Foote!

From first glance, these cookies appeared to be the classic chocolate chip that had maybe been cooked a little long- just a bit too brown. They were a nice tennis ball diameter and had the right thickness. Who likes thin chocolate chips? You just know you aren't going to get that nice gooey chewiness. But the best part, was that these cookies had me duped. I take a bite, and surprise! a little candied ginger zings the tastebuds right next to the sweet creaminess of the choco chips. This spelled heaven to my ambivalent side. How many times have I pondered away at the cookie counter molasses or chocolate chip and then ended up empty handed after fifteen minutes of not being able to decide. Plus, for those more fond of ginger cookies rather than the molasses chew, you will be happy to know these will satisfy your craving. That candied ginger gives them more punch than two teaspoons of the ground variety.

OK here is the breakdown: These cookies were baked right here in NE PDX by the stellar chefstress, Ashley Tackett. She found the recipe on Orangette's blog who also just happens to spin from Portland. The best part: you can make 'em too. Here are the details:
http://orangette.blogspot.com/2007/03/wait-and-wonky-molasses.htm