Levain Bakery

COOKIES.

For my brother’s birthday, I ran over to Levain and picked up 3 cookies – ostensibly one each for my mother, brother and I – to enjoy post-hotpot. Levain has long been lauded as some of the best cookies in the city, and yes I waited on a very long line that moved quickly for these… verdict?

I’d picked up one of each kind of cookie offered (minus oatmeal raisin); dark chocolate chocolate chip, chocolate chip walnut, and dark chocolate peanut butter chip. Though it’s hard to tell in the pic, these are HUGE, dense cookies – there is no way I could have eaten a whole one in a single sitting. As it was, we took turns breaking off pieces of each cookie and comparing notes (which was a bizarre and fun exercise in how insane my family is about food, no joke)… and we each came to different conclusions. I was all about the dark chocolate chocolate chip cookie – the perfect darkness (very rich chocolate with only a hint of sweetness), crisp edges with a chewy center, melty almost creamy chips despite being fully room temp… awesome.

My mother liked the chocolate chip walnut, which was no surprise – she likes most nuts (thus her children…), and walnuts are no exception. I thought that was a very good cookie as well, with the contrasting nutmeat texture mixed in it was my second favorite of the three.

Bro liked the peanut butter best for his own reasons… likely he prefers a slightly crisper, drier cookie than I do.

No one was wrong, and we all went home winners: with each of us liking different cookies, we took the remnants of our respective favorites with us and enjoyed the rest later!