However much I love cookies, they’re easily equated with drudgery in the food prep world.  A large batch of batter can be made and a few may be baked off right away, but it’s awfully convenient to enlist a person, arm her with an ice cream scoop, and instruct her to scoop the batter into little mounds in interminable rows onto baking sheets.  They can then be frozen and baked fresh as needed, but the beauty of the individual cookie is easily lost in the process.

So, I was happy to find Isabella’s Cookies at Cooke’s Market in El Segundo, Los Angeles, which has rejuvenated my jaded cookie sensibility.  These are cookies are sold in markets across LA.  My favorite so far is the Muffy Cookie. It had white chocolate, blueberries, and milk chocolate covered blueberries, and it has the uncanny taste of a blueberry muffin.  The dough part seems to have a little less brown sugar than the dough of a chocolate chip cookie, and I think that the particular sweetness of the white chocolate somehow helps to evoke the muffin flavor.

The Twister is another good one — chocolate toffee pieces with chunks of milk chocolate.  I’m looking forward to getting my hands on their CranApple Fritter Cookie, with oatmeal, apples, cranberries, white chocolate chips, and cinnamon.

Isabella’s Cookies seem like the Ben & Jerry’s of the cookie world.  Made out of an eclectic mix of wholesome ingredients (unbleached flour, fresh butter and eggs, no preservatives, no hydrogenated oils or high fructose corn syrup), they’re fun and tasty.  They’re moist and voluminous, but a little less sweet than cookies normally found in supermarkets, so they taste like real food… and are very addictive.  They also make me want to play around with doughs and flavorings of cookies more…

This entry was posted on Monday, June 5th, 2006 at 7:35 pm and is filed under Los Angeles, Sampling, Stores. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.