HEY GUESS WHAT! A little birdie told me that Lotus Bakeries is having a sweet giveaway. I apologize for being late on the boat on this one — it ends on Nov 21! You still have some time but hurry up! It’s one entry per person per day!
Beginning Nov. 1 through Nov. 21, the “Take a Biscoff Break” Holiday Giveaway will give you the chance to win these delicious prizes:
Grand Prize: A year’s worth of Biscoff cookies starting with a beautiful glass jar filled with tasty Biscoff cookies and replacement shipments throughout the year (OOOOOOMMMGGGG)
First Prizes: 10 decorative glass jarsfilled with Biscoff cookies (I LOVE decorative glass jars!)
Second Prizes: 50 festive Biscoff ‘Joy Hope Wish’ holiday cookie tubes(6-pack): The perfect hostess gift and stocking stuffer (Well, I am a perfect hostess.)
Biscoff “Joy Hope Wish” holiday tubes are the perfect stocking stuffer and make a great hostess and teacher gifts. Until December 31, 2010, for every six or 12-pack sold of the holiday tubes, Lotus Bakeries will donate 10% of the purchase to Teach For America, (www.teachforamerica.org). Teach for America is a national corps of well-trained teachers and leaders who are helping break the cycle of educational inequity across our country. Since inception, the organization has positively impacted the lives of 3 million children in the US.
My birthday was a month ago, but I still wanted to write this post!
Fresh Beginnings sent me a tin of cookies — no, make that TWO tins of cookies — for my mom and me. They sent me another as a surprise!!
USC colored balloons thanks to Moms Nguyen, and the very very cute and beautiful cookie tin I deeply apologize for the horrible quality of the photos. I get home at night and I have to take these pictures before people (ie I) dig in to the goodies!
Everything was YUM!!! Bark, nuts, turtles, chocolate covered pretzels, chocolate covered nuts, cookies, chocolate chocolate and chocolate. Just like the chocolate dipped cookies, there was just the right amount of chocolate on the rest of the goodies to perfectly complemented the snack. As a recipient of a birthday tin I can say I was pleasantly surprised and very happy!!! Well, my family was. This was enough to feed a few regular families actually… just one Nguyen family though. Thank you, Fresh Beginnings!
PS – Still loving how the tins are reusable and a great reminder of my wonderful 25th and the great life I was blessed.
My previous post on chocolate chip and chocolate dipped chocolate chip cookies can be found here: Fresh Beginnings
Whoa!! MUCH belated review!! I totally told Cookie Gallery I would review their cookies WEEKS ago. I’m so sorry!
I got some super cute cookies from Cookie Gallery — however, I didn’t exactly feel comfortable eating them because I was told that there was gelatin in the cookies (even though the ingredients list didn’t mention anything about gelatin). So I spread the love to my friends and coworkers
I got the Beach Cutie Cookies. I told you they are cute!! Star, crab, sea turtle, dolphin, fish…
…and there are THREE LAYERS of them 30 cookies! Here’s a couple outside the box:
They are vibrant in color and perfect for bite-sized snacks. I wish they for sure did not have gelatin in them! From what I could tell, they are a pretty standard sugar cookie with smooth icing: crunchy (and a little dry and crumbly), thick and not too sweet. To be honest, most everyone had a mediocre reaction to the cookies. However, much like some of the other cookies I’ve eaten, Cookie Gallery specializes not necessarily in taste but in design. From the looks of their website, they have a lot of different types of cookies! Ooohmygosh they are having a Thanksgiving sale and their stuff is the CUTEST!!
(yes, the Pilgrim bear comes with it too!!)
HAHAHA look at the Halloween ones!!
AAAAAHHHHHHHHHH I FOUND SOME DUCKS!!!!!!!!
AND THEY HAVE PINK BOWS ON THEM!!!!!! AHHHHH HOW CUTE!!!
Ok I am getting so lost on this website. They have so many cookies!! Wedding, birthday, seasonal, cute, baby shower, Hawaiian, Party Monkey… The cookies are baked fresh in SoCal and then hand decorated. HAND FREAKIN’ DECORATED. Every single one of them! And the prices are actually really good, most ranging from $12 – $18 for 8 or so big ones to 30 small ones. Shipping costs depend on how much you buy and when you want it, but I imagine you would probably spend about $6 – $20 for a single order, closer to the $20 end if you wanted the cookies closer to the baked date.
Taste: Not sure but I imagine around a 6 or 7, considering most people I gave it to either didn’t finish or didn’t go for seconds
Crust and center moistness: crunchy all around
Value: Great prices!
Overall: Super cute and skilled designs for a great price. I’d say do some research on more companies that do this and keep Cookie Gallery on your list!
A rep from Fresh Beginnings contacted me last week telling me she would send me a customized cookie tin! Fresh Beginnings specializes in freshly baked cookies (although they have other stuff too like pretzels and nuts) and they make tins with pretty designs as well as logos and messages on them. I sent her a picture for the tin that I knew my mom would like.
Quick background story before I get to the video: Moms Nguyen went to Penn State in the 70′s as a refugee, married my dad, had my sis, quit college, had more of us, became an amazing amazing amazing single parent, all the meanwhile dreaming of the day she could go back and obtain her degree but putting us first (and putting UP with us first) always. FINALLY in 2007 my younger sis went off to college as a Triton (UCSD!) which gave my mom the go ahead to go back to school. After some mild drama getting back into school; LOOONG nights; walks in the hard rain, wind and snow; and LOTS of papers (emphasis on LOTS), she not only obtained her bachelor’s but my mother now holds a Master’s degree in American Studies from Penn State University — a dream my mother has held for over 30 years!! (Fun fact for you college football buffs: In the 70′s, Joe Paterno was coaching the Nittany Lions. When my mom went back, he was still coaching!) This is a HUGE deal to the fam, and we are all so proud of her. Thus, the cookie tin. Watch and see! (Remember my mom didn’t know who it was from or what it was or anything!)
And here is Moms saying thank you to Fresh Beginnings
One thing we found out after is that there was a handwritten card accompanying the cookies! Ok, I’m special, but not *that* special. A handwritten note comes with all of them. Soooo personalized!
And some shots of the tins. Really, the pictures don’t do the tins justice:
The great thing about it is that I supplied the company with the picture and what I wanted it to say. They chose the design and the cute background! They certainly have an eye for what looks good.
And now for the cookies! As mentioned in the video, there were chocolate chip and chocolate dipped chocolate chip cookies in here. Here’s what I dug into first, the chocolate covered chocolate chip cookie:
I read the reviews on the Fresh Beginnings site that highly praised the cookies, but I don’t believe it until I taste it. And now I believe it. They definitely deserve the 5 stars. My work friend commented that there is one THICK layer of chocolate on this cookie.
I’ve had chocolate covered sweets before, but none that taste like this. The chocolate complements the rest of the cookie so well in such a way that adds another level of taste to it, unlike other foods where the chocolate layer is really much more independent and doesn’t fit the rest of the treat exactly right.
Now, about the actual cookie:
(Apologies for slightly lower photo quality.. I took this picture with my camera on my phone) This is one of those cookies where you do a double take and go, “holy crap, this IS good!” I think the best thing about these cookies is that they’re soft and gooey on the inside (thanks to the fact that they’re freshly baked). They’re not crumbly and they hit the sweet craving (you know, the one you didn’t know you had until you bit into this cookie) just right. Funny thing is that even though there is only a medium amount of chocolate chips in here (and I require a LOT), I’m not complaining about that this time around. It’s probably because the rest of the cookie tasted so good.
Oh, and by the way. THE COOKIES ARE ONLY 90 CALORIES EACH!!! The chocolate covered ones have 170. I totally ate one of each today but it was SO worth it. And the tins are so awesome and totally reusable. For more cookies, of course.
HOWEVER. One thing I don’t like is that these cookies have partially hydrogenated oils in them. Probably one of the reasons why they taste so good! If they did away with the hydrogenated oils I would like them so much more. Also, the chocolate gets on your hands when you touch it. For normal people it would be ok because you would just hold it by the non-dipped part. But for us cookie bloggers who hold the cookies in the palm of our hands for comparison purposes, it’s just something we’re bound to notice.
Value: $20 for 20 chocolate chip cookies; $33 for 40 chocolate chip cookies. It’s an extra $3 for the customized tin, then there’s shipping from Georgia. GREAT price!!! TOTALLY worth it!
Overall: I’m pretty picky about my food, so the partially hydrogenated oils are a turn off. But on the other hand, this would be more about the cookies AND the tin rather than just the cookies. (Also, it’s worth mentioning that the hydrogenated oils wouldn’t stop me from buying them from others.. nor does it stop me from eating them.) Anyway, I know that most other people don’t care about the hydrogenated oil, so this would make a wonderful gift for family or corporate! BUY! 9 for the partially hydrogenated oil, 10 for everyone else besides me.
I was STOKED that bro’s apartment was within walking distance to The Chicago Diner! Gosh, I HAVE to go back to Chicago. That restaurant has the BEST sweet potato fries I’ve ever eaten. Sadly couldn’t say that about the cookie. First let’s look at the ingredients and nutrition list:
First of all, the sheer number of calories: each cookie has OVER 500 CALORIES in it. That’s about the same number of ingredients this cookie has. Or a little less than a third of my daily caloric intake. Why the heck does this cookie have so many calories? It is indeed a sizeable cookie, but FIVE HUNDRED TWENTY EIGHT CALORIES BIG!??!
No dairy and no eggs (potato and tapioca starches and non-dairy leavening lend themselves to emulsify in the place of eggs). Also lacking in taste. I thought this cookie was very bland. The only tasty part of this cookie is the chocolate chips. The best thing about this cookie is that is actually a moderate amount of chocolate chips in here. The cookie also has quite a bit of height:
You can also see in this picture that the cookie has the same texture throughout the cookie from outside to inside, circumference to center. It’s not crunchy, but rather it is on the soft and crumbly side. I hate crumbly. If you haven’t figured it out by now, I would say pass on this cookie.
I'm here to do the dirty stuff. I'll take the guesswork out of choosing which cookies are the best, the worst, and the in betweens. I've been eating cookies ever since I had teef so you can definitely trust me.
If you'd like to contact me personally to ask a question privately, request a cookie review, send cookies, ask me out on a date, not throw eggs at my house, etc., my email address is: editor[at]chloescookieblog.com. (Don't forget to take out the anti-spambot brackets!)
Grand Prize: A year’s worth of Biscoff cookies starting with a beautiful glass jar filled with tasty Biscoff cookies and replacement shipments throughout the year (OOOOOOMMMGGGG)
I deeply apologize for the horrible quality of the photos. I get home at night and I have to take these pictures before people (ie I) dig in to the goodies!
