Every weekend, my friends and I gallivant through New York City on a food adventure. Sometimes we go to places recommended to us by friends or family. Other times we go to venues written about online or in the New York Times. Most of the time, we take our advice from the pro's and go to places featured on the Food Network. (If a restaurant, cafe, or bakery has been on a Bobby Flay Throwdown, and is in N.Y.C., you can pretty much guarantee it's on my list of places to go.)
After a long stressful first week back at Barnard, I was craving something sweet to balance out the sourness of the endless amount of pages I had to read that weekend. (Why oh why did I sign up for both art history AND European history?)
It didn't take much to persuade my friends to go to Levain Bakery, on West 74th Street, not far from where we live. It's interesting how the word "cookie" can light up a college student's face.
The moment we walked into the small brightly lit bakery we were inundated - BLASTED - ENGULFED by the heavenly smell of gourmet cookies being baked. It was as if a chocolate and sugar tidal wave had taken over our noses, and for that matter, all our senses. "Why, oh why can't our school cafeteria smell like this!?" one of my friends asked.
Well, it's a good thing our cafeteria does not bake cookies like Levain's does, because if they did, students would gain much more than just the freshman fifteen. (The freshman fifty would be more like it.)
Decisions, decisions....what would it be? (There didn't seem to be a wrong choice, but still...) I finally decided to buy the Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Chip cookie. My friend Elana bought the Chocolate Chip Walnut, and we split them.
The Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Chip cookie was still warm when I bit into it. Cue, eyes widening. Sighs of chocolate peanut butter contentment. The peanut butter chips had melted into the dark chocolate cookie dough. The cookie was baked perfectly. It was crispy yet gooey, sweet, yet not overpoweringly sugary, perhaps because it was dark rather than milk chocolate. To make a big cookie into a short story, I had found paradise in this wonderful mixture of flour, sugar, and eggs. The Chocolate Chip Walnut cookie was equally good. The chocolate chip to walnut ratio was utopian. It was a rich and shamelessly decadent dessert - the kind of chocolate chip cookie that puts other chocolate chip cookies to shame. I do hope my chocolate chip cookie experience has not peaked at age 19.
You don't need to take college calculus to know that friends + out-of-this-world-delicious-cookies = the perfect start of the semester.
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