Good Looking Home Cooking: Bakery Review: Levain Bakery, Home to the World's Best Cookie. Period.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Bakery Review: Levain Bakery, Home to the World's Best Cookie. Period.

I don't want to sound like a cookie snob, but I have been around and had some pretty freaking awesome cookies. The cookies from Levain Bakery, however, send me over the edge. They blow all the other cookies out of the cookie batter (corny joke I know). My mom first introduced me to Levain Bakery after she saw the cookies on Oprah. She showed up at work with a bag full of delicious treats from the bakery and I shared it all with my co-wrokers and I went back the following morning to try the cookies for myself. Inside the bakery, 7 NYPD came in and proclaimed "You know it's a good bakery when the cops are showing up for cookies." This small bakery churns out huge, gooey cookies that are crunchy on the outside and smell nothing less than incredible. When my good friend, Maxine, came to visit in the spring time, we went there and she was hooked. Here is a picture of the first time she tried these magnificent and magical cookies.

When Maxine came to visit just last week, she picked up some cookies for us to have as dessert in the evenings. The cookies are $3.75 a pop which is pricey for cookie, but is cheap considering the pleasure it brings and they are huge! It was a wonderful surprise and with milk these cookies are divine. The most talked about cookie at Levain Bakery is the chocolate chip walnut cookie pictured above. This one is also Maxine's favorite. My favorite is the Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter cookies.

Unlike most chocolate peanut butter cookies, where the peanut flavor is condensed in peanuts, the use of peanut butter makes for a more powerful peanut punch and it melts in with the rest of the cookie so it is consistently gooey and not crunchy. The night before Halloween, Maxine and I dressed up and went dancing until the wee hours. I was Where's Waldo and she was a 40's pin-up star. At the end of the night, or should I say in the early morning, these cookies were the perfect completion before going to sleep.

After all that dancing we chose the cookies below over traditional late night pizza without any hesitation. These are finger licking delicious and will change your life. Get ready to have some serious cravings!