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

*whew* Felt good to get that off my chest!

She sent me an email telling me she bakes good cookies. I’m like, ok.. it’s like whenever people hear that I play ping pong: they usually tell me that they’re really good and they’re the best on their block. Then their asses get beat and they walk away crying because they don’t know what it means to play against a former Women’s Team Captain of the USC Table Tennis Team on the USC Ping Pong Posse who helped bring her team to the NCTTA College Nationals 3 years in a row.

But I digress.

I’m sometimes up for a challenge, and always up for a cookie tasting!!! So she sent me my favorite cookies (white chip mac nut and choc chip). AN ENTIRE DOZEN. She said she wants to start in the big-times, selling them on her own and all, online nonetheless. Well, I think her presentation is impressive:

A FREAKIN DOZEN.

List of ingredients. Notice: does not include ANY hydrogenated oils or high fructose corn syrup. Just normal stuff that you have in your kitch. A fact which, as I’ll explain in a sec, completely pissed me off.

I can’t believe I held onto this cookie wrapped long enough to take a picture

..and to take another one. I FINALLY bit into it, and omg. I think I’m in love. (el novio debe estar preocupado.) She warned me that the ones packaged / sent / received days later might taste not so great, but Holy Sugar Rush Batman, if this cookie tastes this awesome right now, how good does it taste right outta the oven?!?! One of the awesomest things about her cookies is that the center stays in that not-fully-baked, gooey, soft, buttery state:

The circumference is a really nice sorta crunchy texture (not too crunchy) and the middle of the cookie is softer. The outside of the cookie (like the top and bottom) are medium soft, and the middle is incredibly moist and delicious. It was PERFECT. Not sure how she managed to fit 3 different kinds of moisture and texture into one cookie 12 times but she did. OH. And I MUST mention that my new BFF got  a really good chips/nut to cookie ratio!? jeebus! *SO* hard to find. Ok. I’ll say it. It was the best cookie ever. OMG! I said it.

Chocolate chip! Same thing. You can see the homemade texture on this cookie really well.

And this is where I explain to you why I’m pissed off about the ingredient list. That list? I have EVERYTHING on that list. So.. why can’t *I* make these cookies?!?!? So. Not. Fair.

LaRae, take it from your new BFF. You’d be doing the world a disservice if you did not put your cookies up for sale on the interwebs. If anyone has experience doing an e-commerce site or making a website in general and is looking for some freelance work, hit me up!! If you would like to try the cookies I’ll hook you up to her too, leave a comment. Come on, it’s for the good of all of us!! If that doesn’t work out for you, try selling your cookies to Cheryl & Co., because they know nothing about “gourmet” cookies. You’ve set a new standard for cookies! Diddy Riese, step aside.. you’re now my #2.

They have several different varieties; I really like the Chocolate Chunk line (except the one with pecans in it — not a huge fan of any other nut besides macadamias in my cookies) and the next line I’m going to get into is the Soft Baked one. I haven’t tried the 100 Calorie packs yet though, I’d be interested in trying those too.

This review will be about the Chocolate Chunk Tahoe White Chocolate Macadamia cookies, since these saved me so badly when I was sans-”normal” cookies:

The cookies are on the large side, definitely; there’s 8 cookies in each bag.

I absolutely love the color on these cookies. Perfectly baked. AND, there’s the exact right amount of “toppings” in the cookies; every bite has more than one chip or nut so you get a mouthful of yumminess rather than a mouthful of just dough sometimes. Don’t think that these cookies are overly sweet though; the dough is not too sweet (just slightly buttery), which balances out the sweetness of the other components. The chocolate chunk ones are the crunchy ones, and believe me when I say to listen to the label. These are very crunchy, which do translate into crumbly, which leads to a mess on your shirt and your mouth (and the dining room floor). In addition, because these are so crunchy / crumbly, sometimes pieces break off that you didn’t bite into (I hope you have fast reflexes. Or don’t listen to the 5-second rule). Another slightly annoying thing about these cookies is that they (moreso than other cookies) leave a lot of cookie on your teeth so your tongue gets a good workout. Other than that, these cookies have a great flavor and aren’t too dry. Pepperidge Farm is also the only brand I can think of that make milk chocolate macadamia nut cookies too, so they definitely get points from me regarding that.

• Taste: 10
• Crust crunchiness: 10 for very crunchy
• Center crunchiness: 10 for very crunchy
• Value: when they’re on sale at Ralphs for $2.50 or $3, 10; remember, there’s 8 cookies in this bag! They’re normally $4 or $5, and I’m cheap, and I don’t buy them unless they’re on sale.
• Overall: 10, for being my go-to grocery store cookie

Check out Pepperidge Farm’s other cookies here.