Cookie Review - Tiffany's Bakery

After school last friday, I took a break from my usual role of The Boring Mother Who Asks You To Do Homework And Practice Piano (I've carefully honed my craft), and I took the kids to the bakery around the corner. We brought along Adam's friend, Holden.

 Two of my short kids and one very tall friend

Ann noticed that Luke has two different shoes on (pretty common at our house). Good eye, Printer!

When we moved here, I was really excited to see a bakery so close to our house. I love bakeries! But Tiffany's was really disappointing. It reminds me of a grocery store bakery that hasn't found its grocery store yet. The bakery items are unimaginative and lackluster. There is no bread sold at Tiffany's Bakery. There are donuts, sugar cookies, m&m cookies, chocolate chip cookies, and decorated cakes, in addition to a few other random items. Nothing I have tried has been very good. When you steal a bite of your kid's cookie and kinda wish you hadn't, then you know something is very wrong.

This time I asked the worker to give me the best cookie in the place. He gave me four kolachies. 

They were filled with apricot and raspberry jams. They were better than other Tiffany's items I've tasted (even the sugar cookies are lousy. The SUGAR COOKIES! How can you go wrong with a sugar cookie?), but the kolachies weren't all that great either. They didn't have good flavor, and they weren't flaky.

All in all, it was a fun trip with the kids, but as far as a "cookie run," it wasn't very satisfying.

There is another bakery about 3 minutes farther down the road. Its offerings are quite good, but very expensive. We'll go there another Friday after school and review the cookies. It might require a subsidy of some sort. I'll make the kids hold up cardboard signs on the corner, and I'll post about that too.

C is for Cookie, That's Good Enough For Us!

Welcome back to another year of baking, dear reader! You'll notice that although we gave bread another shot, it didn't really pan out. Listle was busy with new responsibilities at church, and Ann was pretty swamped with school. Somehow, bread felt really daunting all the time. Therefore, we're abandoning it for now and moving on to something that feels more familiar, but still worthy of exploration: cookies!

As usual, it's hard to define a cookie. Epicurious says that they're "hand-held, flour-based sweet cakes", but what we can think of many exceptions to this. What about macaroons or meringues? How do madeleines fit in? Are there other exceptions to the definition that don't start with M? So, as usual, we all know a cookie when we see it.

Here are our rules:

1.) We can't make the same kind of cookie in the same month, unless we're doing a bake-off (which may or may not have already happened!).

2.) We want to explore as many cookies as possible, so no repeats per individual. However, you can make the same type of cookie as someone else later in the year.

3.) The cookies may be shared with at least one other person.

4.) One kind of cookie must be decorated with frosting so we can practice more piping.

5.) We will incorporate reviews of good cookies made by others that we've sampled throughout the year.

6.) We will include book reviews related to cookies.

7.) We will be AWESOME about posting our cookie baking adventures within two weeks. No six month long gaps! We promise!