Cookie Review: Pacific Cookie Company
Not sure what was in the stars but Cara Pearson of Pacific Cookie Company had really good timing, sending a heartbroken girl two dozen cookies. TWO DOZEN! 24! Helped lift my spirits a little bit:
Pacific Cookie Company is gourmet cookie gift basket and boxes company based out of NorCal. (Haha, remember that post where I was like, what makes a gourmet cookie?) They have a retail store too! They use high-quality, natural ingredients with no trans fats (you hear that? straight butter. none of this “hydrogenated oils” crap in these cookies!). The pb they use in their pb cookies is Skippy. And the chocolate they use is Guittard chocolate — just as fancy as Valrhona chocolate, which I ate earlier at LAMILL! Fun facts (thanks wiki): Guittard chocolate is Frenchy, and they were the first company to make chocolate chips. They also use pure cane sugar as opposed to regular white / refined sugar, which ensures the eater of said cookies that there is a lot less chemical activity involved in these ingredients. Amen to them. Another piece in limiting the number of chemical interactions with their ingredients comes in their unbleached and unbromated flour, which is, obviously, flour that doesn’t have potassium bromate. I’m sure you totally knew that.
LOL, jk. Wow, I’m learning a lot today! Unbromated flour is a higher protein baking flour that yes does not contain potassium bromate, which is typically added to bread flour to help the elasticity of the baked product. UNbromated flour is more stable due to its higher concentration of gluten obtained from more proteins and is desired by bread bakers in general as well as those in higher altitudes. Some say it’s even safer than regular flour since the bromation (…wow.. that sounds like two dudes hanging out. bromance. bromation) might maybe possibly cause cancer. I would like for my cookies to not give me cancer…
Here’s the breakdown of the cookie list. Oh, the variety!!
(green hearts mean all natural and red hearts means 0 grams trans fat.)
K so she gave me 4 varieties of cookies. The first one I dug into was Cahootz! (white choc mac nut):
This was super yum. The mac nuts are HUGE! The cookie was soft with multiple mac nuts in every bite. Sometimes the nuts even split in between bites because they were so big. Once in a while I ate a white chip but to be honest I was so busy being amazed by the generosity of the mac nuts. There’s coconut in here fyi but I couldn’t taste any. Unfortunately for me the cookies were wrapped with the lemon cookie and the flavors definitely seeped through the plastic so the smell of the lemon and the taste of the cookie kind of meshed. After a couple of days though when I put the cookies apart, the lemon went away and the cookies were better. I was feeling shitty that day and I totally ate this with Lovin’ Scoopful ice cream and found out that this cookie would make a really good other half to an ice cream sandwich because it’s soft and not too sweet!
Shared some of this cookie with my buddies:
This was the lemon drop that partially contaminated my Cahootz!. It looks like this cookie has the smallest ingredient list. My friends really liked this one! They said it tasted like candy and likened it to a Starburst! I don’t particularly like lemon so I made sure that as many other people could try it as possible. It wasn’t popular with the sisters though, unfortunately. So, mixed reviews on this one. I ate a piece, and the lemon doesn’t kick in until a second later. I think my sisters didn’t like it because it was very sweet.
I was excited about the dark chocolate cranberry:
This cookie was good. Browned to perfection here. The Guittard chocolate was smooth and wasn’t bitter like other dark chocolates. The texture was not too soft but not crunchy either — a really good in-between. The dried cranberries made your teef sticky though, but I didn’t mind. I love dark chocolate! Another cookie with a simple ingredient list.
Then came the almond joe:
I think it was this cookie that the boss boss at work called “un-fucking-believable” (verbatim). Well if it wasn’t this cookie it was the dark choc cranberry. Anyway, man, this cookie is like a circus in your mouth! Semi-sweet choc, almonds, coconut. I was hesitant about this one because of the coconut (both shredded c0conut and pure coconut flavor) but I didn’t really taste it or it didn’t bother me that much. In other words the coconut flavor is not overpowering the rest of the cookie. It was definitely more about the semi-sweet chocolate and nuts in this one for me. I think I actually preferred this one over the dark choc cran because the texture throughout the cookie meshed better. In contrast to the Cahootz! cookie, the nuts in this one were smaller in size which made a good balance for the choc chips.
One major drawback is the huge amount of calories each one has. Over 200 calories each cookie! Well, I mean, it *is* a cookie, and I’ve definitely eaten cookies that have more calories, but it’s something I wouldn’t choose to do. My personal preference is 180 cals for one cookie max whereas a chocolate chip cookie from Pacific Cookie Co would have almost 250.
Pacific Cookie Company
(See website for order information)
1203 Pacific Ave.
Santa Cruz, Ca 95060
831.429.6905
- Taste: 8
- Crust and center moistness: very moist and chewy, even a week later!!
- Value: I got the Sweet Elegance cookie gift box, which is on sale right now for $30. Without shipping, it’s $1.25 per cookie! With shipping it’ll probably be a bit less than $2 / cookie? For how long these stayed fresh and the ingredients they use, I would say it’s a really good value. 9
- Overall: They have super cute gift boxes and the recipient is sure to be impressed. You could go with Pacific Cookie Company to impress a (future?) client or to tell a loved one hello or thanks. These cookies are good (but not phenomenal) and they have a lot of calories but they do have a great presentation and last a while, plus they use way fewer ingredients than most other cookie companies out there and many of the ingredients that they DO use haven’t gone through as much chemical processing. And they sure beat the hell out of these other “gourmet” gift basket cookie places. Plus they have unique cookies — I totally want to get in on some Mint Condition cookie action one day. As the investors say — BUY! 8
