I spent my last birthday alone in a Baltimore apartment. It was okay, I didn't really feel like celebrating; I felt content on my own. A few days later I went back to my uncle's and received a mysteriously heavy parcel in the mail. It was a huge box of cookies with no visible card and I was like wtf who FedExes cookies are they SAFE TO EAT and then the card was the bottom of the box!! Turns out Frances and Faith ordered THREE DOZEN COOKIES from the Etsy store Flour Loves Sugar and had it delivered to me. I was really touched. These were my only birthday present for the year. And let me tell you right now, the cookies have totally ruined Oreos for me.
Flour Loves Sugar is an Ohio-based small business that bakes gourmet small-batch cookies from scratch, fresh and made to order. Owned and run by Shannon Haas, it has apparently become very popular -- for good reason, as you will read later. Each order is packaged in a cheerful pink box wrapped with baker's twine. The individual cookie packs have labels hand-written on kraft paper stickers and sealed with baker's twine.
Faith and Frances chose three flavors: chocolate peanut butter, cranberry white chocolate, and red velvet white chocolate. These cookies are absolutely DELICIOUS, I couldn't eat less than two every DAY. Each one is pretty solid on the outside, but delectably soft and moist on the inside. You can see in the texture of the topmost cookie above how the dough must have been ice cream scoop-ed out onto a baking sheet. The dough is not too sweet, with just the right amount of salt, perfectly complementing the generous amount of chocolate chunks scattered within. Each cookie is like chocolate held together with a bit of dough.
My favorite would have to be the chocolate peanut butter; it's like a Reese's cup in cookie form. A close second is the cranberry white chocolate, which is lighter and a bit biscuit-y in texture. It strikes me as a breakfast or tea time cookie. The red velvet white chocolate is a cookie-cake hybrid, delicious but overshadowed by the two former cookies.
Despite being tossed into luggage and kept unsealed for several days, the cookies tasted as fresh as when they arrived. They were so good I couldn't not share, and within a week I was left with none. Thank you so much Frances and Faith!! I have nothing but wonderful memories of these cookies. Thank you for taking the time to surprise and feed a lonely carbivore. *hugsss*