Top Pick Of The Week

August 25, 2009

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Chocolate Chip Cookie

A two-ounce chocolate chip cookie, more than three inches wide, with a shot of milk. All photography by Hannah Kaminsky | THE NIBBLE.

WHAT IT IS: Fresh-baked, homestyle cookie favorites.
WHY IT’S DIFFERENT: The recipes are professionally executed variations of the classics, yet they come across as “baked with love” by a skilled home baker.
WHY WE LOVE IT: Perfect comfort food for people of all ages.
WHERE TO BUY IT: StonyBrookCookie.com.
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Stony Brook Cookie Company: Gourmet Cookie Gifts

CAPSULE REPORT: If you live in the vicinity of Geneva, New York, you can pop into the Stony Brook Bakery for warm, fresh-from-the-oven cookies. The rest of us have to order them by mail—slightly less warm, but sent fresh from the oven and arriving as delicious as if you’d baked them yourself (or as grandma baked them, if you’re not a whiz in the kitchen). In fact, in these days, when most of us have more good intentions than time to enact them, Stony Brook Cookie Company is our surrogate, baking home-style cookies with finesse, packing them in cocoa-colored excelsior and dark brown tissue paper, and nestling them in a dark brown or kraft paper box. It’s just homey enough to convey to the recipient that you could have baked them yourself.

All of the ingredients are fresh as can be: butter and eggs from a local dairy co-op, flour from a local artisan mill and almonds and pecans toasted in the bakery oven. The chocolate is from Callebaut. The varieties include Super Chocolate Chunk, a classic chocolate chunk cookie; Double Chocolate Pecan, made with bittersweet chocolate and cocoa; Oatmeal Cranberry & White Chocolate, a superior oatmeal cookie; and Stony Brook Jumble, with dried cherries, chocolate chunks, almonds and coconut. Read more about these charmers in the full review. And think of whose day would be brightened with a fresh-baked cookie gift.

One more tip: The same folks make a unique butternut squash seed oil under another umbrella, at WholeHeartedFoods.com. We’ll be writing more about it, but if you’re looking for an exciting new culinary oil, this is it.

     
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.

 

The Scoop On Cookies

Cookie History Chocolate Chip Cookies Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies
History Of Cookies. Read the history of cookies, and learn the eight different types of cookies. History Of The Chocolate Chip Cookie. Read how this iconic cookie was a happy accident in the kitchen. Chocolate Chip Cookie Trivia Quiz. Learn fun trivia about America’s favorite cookie.

Stony Brook Cookie Company: Gourmet Cookie Gifts

INDEX OF REVIEW

This is Page 1 of a two-page article. Click on the black links to visit other pages.

MORE TO DISCOVER

Introduction To Stony Brook Cookies

Stony Brook Cookie Company is all about local and fresh. Located in Geneva, New York, in the heart of the beautiful Finger Lakes Region, it is just down the road from Cornell University’s Agricultural Experiment Station and Food Venture Center. The two organizations collaborate on product development, focusing on the bounty of the thriving agricultural community of Ontario County. Grade AA butter is purchased from a dairy cooperative of Central New York dairies. The cage-free, antibiotic-free eggs are hatched at a nearby poultry farm. Even the unbleached wheat flour is milled from wheat grown just a few miles from the bakery. The sulfite-free dried fruits come from New York and Michigan (where one must go for cherries), and the chocolate is made in Vermont by Callebaut, although the astute reader will note that cacao beans are grown only in the tropics and must be imported.

That’s locavore!

As you can guess, no preservatives, hydrogenated oils, trans fat, artificial flavors or colors are used in the cookies. Everything is freshness and top quality.

 

Oatmeal Cookies
Oatmeal Cranberry & White Chocolate cookies update the classic by substituting cranberries for raisins, and adding a lilt of white chocolate.

For mail orders, the cookies are baked to order and shipped on the same day. They arrive tasting oven fresh—and demand to be eaten at once, which takes no arm twisting whatsoever.

An environmentally conscious company, Stony Brook Cookies bags its treats in biodegradable cellophane, tied with raffia ribbon. The cookie gift boxes and hang tags are made of 100% recycled post-consumer content, and the hang tags are printed with water-soluble inks. The biodegradable packing peanuts are made from potato starch and the excelsior (the shredded “Easter nest” paper) in the gift boxes is recycled paper.

While it will take you at least until tomorrow to get your own order of Stony Brook Cookies, you can taste each of the varieties along with us on the next page.

—Karen Hochman

Continue To Page 2: Varieties Of Stony Brook Cookies

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