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Heaven, we’re in heaven ... (to paraphrase Irving Berlin, who never had any of Lisa’s crunchy, chocolate-packed chocolate chip cookies and other baked wonders). Photography by Claire Freierman. |
| WHAT IT IS: “Home-baked” cookies and bars. |
| WHY IT’S DIFFERENT: Great recipes, the finest ingredients and skillful baking produce perfect examples of their kind. |
| WHY WE LOVE IT: One word: Yum! If we knew where to buy cookies and bars that taste this good in our own town, we would head there. Thank goodness for the Internet, our global marketplace! |
| WHERE TO BUY IT: LisasCookieShop.com. Buy everything—seriously. There are only five items (fewer if you don’t like coconut—but it’s hard not to like it in Lisa’s hands). |
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Lisa’s Cookie Shop:
Shop Early, Shop Often
CAPSULE REPORT: Lisa Ciriello must be one of the most popular citizens in the charming Victorian town of Warwick, New York. After just one bite of her cookies and bars, you’d be willing to travel hours to greater Warwick (55 miles from New York City), the only place where her products are retailed. Instead, save the time, save the gas, save the plane fare: Shop online and feast in a day or three when the FedEx driver delivers your order.
Oh, what crisp, crunchy, wonderful cookies you’ll receive: Chocolate Chip cookies, Coconut Chocolate Chip cookies and Kitchen Sink cookies. You could make meal of these cookies and never feel sick, they seem so wholesome and nutritious. (We know, as we’ve done it five or six times while “researching” this review.) Just the fragrance of butter, chocolate and other fine ingredients leaping out of the bag might be satisfying enough for those who feel the need for restraint. The soft, chewy pecan coconut bars and raspberry bars are equally magnificent. And THE NIBBLE staff flipped over the moist, tender Frazzleberry Cookies. Invite your friends for a tea party or coffee klatsch. Lisa is so nice, she won’t mind if you pretend that you made everything yourself (after all, it’s baked to order). Read the full review below to nibble in depth on Lisa’s all-natural gourmet cookies, and plan ahead for Easter gifts, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day gifts and summer camp.
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THE NIBBLE does not sell the foods we review
or receive fees from manufacturers for recommending them.
Our recommendations are based purely on our opinion, after tasting thousands of products each year, that they represent the best in their respective categories. |
Bake Your Own Cookies With These Five-Star Recipes
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Martha Stewart's Cookies: The Very Best Treats to Bake and to Share, by Martha Stewart Living Magazine. Bake the gamut from perennial favorites to the more creative, like peppermint meringue sandwiches and carrot cake cookies. Click here for more information or to purchase. |
The Williams-Sonoma Collection: Cookies, by Marie Simmons. Time-honored favorites and fresh ideas by a double James Beard award-winning cookbook author. Full-color photos of each cookie make this book a delight to thumb through, even when you’re not in baking mode. Click here for more information or to purchase. |
Great Cookies: Secrets to Sensational Sweets, by Carole Walter. There’s something for every taste and occasion, from traditional favorites like Favorite Lemon Squares and Snickerdoodles, to the trail mix–inspired Teton Trailers and chewy Midnight Macaroons. Click here for more information or to purchase. |
Lisa’s Cookie Shop: Shop Early, Shop Often
INDEX OF REVIEW
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MORE TO DISCOVER
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Introduction
During her career in the leveraged buyout industry, Lisa Ciriello had sought a change to a profession where she could work at home and raise a family. She had grown up loving fine food and was skilled at making it. She started an artisan cookie business in her home kitchen and achieved the kind of success that enabled her to build a commercial kitchen on her own property. She is now living the dream of a business owner with no commute—a dream of many people who would love to own an artisan food business, although few people would envy the long hours and hard work.
Frazzleberry Cookies: It’s never too late to enjoy
the cookies your mother never baked.
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Lisa wants to “bring to our customers the cookies they grew up on, made by hand, with the highest quality ingredients.” Fortunately, our mom baked as well as Lisa does; but if your household wasn’t as blessed, here’s your chance to recoup your losses. There’s a school of therapy* with the philosophy that it’s never too late to have a second childhood, and experience all the good things you should have gotten the first time around, including wonderful, homemade cookies.
*Rational Emotive Therapy
There are eight basic types of cookies. Lisa makes two of them—drop cookies and bar cookies—that are quite the enjoyable form of therapy. The current collection includes four drop cookies— Chocolate Chip Cookies, Coconut Chocolate Chip Cookies, Kitchen Sink Cookies and Frazzleberry Cookies; and two bar cookies, Raspberry Bars and Pecan Bars.
(What are the other six types of cookies? Learn more about the different types of cookies and history of the cookie). |
You should certainly order one of everything. There are only seven cookies per bag, and four or five bars. If you need to make peace with family members, order enough bags so that you can invite them over for coffee or tea, set out a spread, and watch them munch happily away. The cookies are real serotonin reuptake inhibitors: No one will get cross or bring up old angst as long as their plates are full. Give them a few bags to take home; the cookies will act like penicillin and heal a wound or two.
Drop Cookies
Perhaps the most famous drop cookie in America is the chocolate chip cookie, invented by accident in 1937 on Cape Cod by Ruth Wakefield, who cut a bar of Nestlé semisweet chocolate into tiny pieces and added it to a butter cookie dough (read the history of chocolate chip cookies). Since then, many bakers have created countless variations of the original recipe. There are little chocolate chip cookies and big ones; soft, chewy cookies and hard, crunchy ones; cookies with mini chips and cookies with jumbo chips and chunks; cookies sprinkled with a few chips and cookies packed with them; purist chocolate chip cookies and those coupled with nuts, fruits and candies; and those with different dough bases (chocolate cookies, oatmeal cookies, cherry cookies and more). And don’t forget the sibling chips: milk chocolate, white chocolate, butterscotch, mint, cherry.
A statistics student could write a paper on the potential number of variations, but Lisa Ciriello has chosen just three to start: Chocolate Chip (no nuts), Coconut Chocolate Chip and Kitchen Sink.
For those who wish that every soft, chewy chocolate chip cookie was a crisp, crunchy chocolate chip cookie: Lisa has answered those wishes with one of the best crispy chocolate chip cookies we’ve ever had.
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Why make a decision? The Kitchen Sink cookies, best-sellers, have chocolate chunks, coconut, oats, cranberries and macadamia nuts. |
A mini-chain of nice Belgian-based bakery cafés that we are happy to have in New York City, Le Pain Quotidien, is lauded for their crispy chocolate chip cookies. If you are a fan of them, let us assure you that Lisa trumps Belgium. Her cookies have more chocolate chips and don’t have the tad-too-much sweetness of the Belgian recipe. If that sounds like a contradiction, it isn’t: It’s what good baking is all about. Some people say that “good baking is no secret,” but it is. Just look at the ingredients in Lisa’s cookies: the same all-purpose flour, real semi-sweet chocolate chips (Ghirardelli), sugar, brown sugar, butter, eggs, vanilla, baking soda and salt as in any recipe. Then, tell us the difference between these exciting bites and a lot of other unexciting chocolate chip cookies you taste. The answer is in the proportions of each ingredient, the baking time and temperatures. Those are Lisa’s secrets, and we’re not even going to ask her. She’s spent a lot of time working out the formulas!
Our heart beats so that we can hardly speak...but who needs to speak when you have a plate of Coconut Chocolate Chip Cookies from Lisa’s Cookie Shop? The texture comes from both coconut and rolled oats. |
Coconut Chocolate Chip Cookies
The oatmeal cookie is America’s second favorite drop cookie, and Lisa’s Coconut Chocolate Chip Cookie is an oatmeal cookie hybrid (photo at left). That is, it’s an oatmeal cookie, a chocolate chip cookie and a coconut cookie all in one. It’s spectacular. The overall impression is crunchy coconut cookie with lots of chocolate chips—or is that a chocolate chip cookie with lots of crunchy coconut? We can’t figure it out, but either one of them has extra texture and flavor nuances from rolled oats, the base ingredient of oatmeal cookies. We love this one: an inspired recipe that, even if you think you don’t like coconut, will surprise you. Here, you’ll find the crisp, crunchy side of coconut, not the moist version. Looking for excuses to enjoy it more often, we’re ready to break it into pieces and eat it with milk as a breakfast cereal.
Kitchen Sink Cookies
From coconuts, oats and chocolate chips, it was just a small leap to the Kitchen Sink Cookie: oatmeal, chocolate chunk, coconut, cranberries and macadamia nuts (photo above). It’s a best seller, and if you like a bit of sweet fruit popping up in your crunch, this may be the one for you (macadamias are always a nice touch). Our heart was snagged by the first two, and how much can a girl eat?
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Frazzleberry Cookies
Frazzled? Take the edge off with some Frazzleberry Cookies. These thumbprint cookies were favorites with many of the NIBBLE staff (photo above). A buttery shortbread cookie rolled in moist, chewy coconut and filled with a thumbprint of raspberry jam, it provides a burst of butter, coconut and raspberry. Lisa tried many jams before she found one that would bake up just right, with a flavor that provided a perfect counterpoint without being too sweet. It turned out to be a favorite from Germany, where she lived for many years. We love the fresh, raspberry flavor, and would like an entire jar! The cookie itself was named after Frazzleberries Country Stores, a retail group in Warwick that sells Lisa’s Cookie Shop products and is the exclusive carrier of this particular cookie.
Bar Cookies
A bar cookie is a cross between a cake and a cookie. The batter is cooked in a pan like a cake, but the recipe is so dense that the baked product is cut into pieces and eaten as a finger food. (Brownies and lemon bars are examples of bar cookies.) The batter or other ingredients are poured or pressed into a rectangular pan (sometimes in multiple layers), then baked and cut into individual-sized squares (sometimes, into smaller, rectangular fingers). Some bars, like brownies, have a thin, delicate crust; others, like “magic” bars and coconut bars (and Lisa’s bars) have a crumb, coconut or other textured topping; all have a moist interior.
The preserves in these raspberry bars are imported from Germany, because nothing domestic was quite right. |
Lisa currently offers two bars. Both are big, moist, chewy, rustic-style bars that are satisfying enough to share.
Pecan Coconut Bars
These Southern-style pecan bars have a rich shortbread crust and a pecan-laden filling, topped with lots of chewy coconut. They are somewhat reminiscent of a pecan coconut pie, if there were such a thing—and there should be. You could enjoy them plain, or with whipped cream, crème fraîche, frozen yogurt or vanilla or chocolate ice cream (if you want to go overboard, rum raisin ice cream).
Raspberry Bars
A best-seller, an all-natural raspberry preserve filling is sandwiched between a buttery almond and pecan and rolled oat crumb crust. There’s enough raspberry filling to make the bars quite sweet. The rolled oats and nut crust provide a good counterpoint, but we needed no sugar in our tea or coffee with these. We preferred to pair them with a tart frozen yogurt, as opposed to ice cream; and we especially enjoyed a dab of sour cream with these (you can mix some brown sugar into it, but it really isn’t necessary). |
We might advise you to eat your cookies within a week to 10 days, but we don’t think this will be an issue. However, if you do find that you are unable to eat your cookies due to religious fasting, influenza or other unforeseen circumstance, everything freezes beautifully. You can remove your cookies one at a time and thaw at room temperature, or microwave. Or, if overwhelmed by passion, eating them frozen causes no harm.
— Karen Hochman
FORWARD THIS NIBBLE to anyone who loves cookies.
Lisa’s cookie shop
Cookies & Bars
- 7 Large (3" Diameter) Cookies
Chocolate Chip, Coconut Chocolate
Chip, Kitchen Sink, Frazzleberry
$6.95
- Bars
Pecan Bars
4 Large Bars
$6.95
Raspberry Bars
5 Large Bars
$6.95
Purchase online* at
LisasCookieShop.com
Or telephone 1.845.987.2167,
Monday through Saturday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.,
Eastern Time.
*Prices and product availability are verified at publication but are subject to change. THE NIBBLE does not sell products; these items are offered by a third party with whom we have no relationship. This link to purchase is provided as a reader convenience. |
Order everything—you’ll love them!
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Read more about our favorite
sweets:
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Check Out These Other “Top Pick Of The Week” Cookies & Bars:
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