balancing flavor & sweetness

We always strive to make the best 6 ounce cookies, period. For us, that means making cookies that have an ideal balance between sweetness and flavor, but sometimes you just can't lower the sugar too much. Our cookies will always be less sweet than traditional American sweets, but we wanted to share a relative scale of how sweet we think our cookies are. 

This is a relative ranking of all of our permanent pudge & shortbread flavors, as well as our summer seasonals (if you follow us on Instagram, this is saved in our "best sellers" highlight!).

A couple weeks ago, we collected feedback from some of our customers and we found that there were many who thought campfire pudge was on the sweeter end -- pushing me back into the test kitchen to double check that I had lowered sugar as best I could. One of the most key parts of cookie testing is indeed, lowering sugar, particularly granulated sugar. And when I went back to test another version of campfire pudge, I broke it. Lowering the brown sugar by just 10g was all it took to become a dreadfully mediocre cookie. You see, dark brown sugar carries a hint of molasses and a flavor that simply can't be replaced. We certainly add other things like browned butter or housemade graham crunch to add dimension, but sometimes you just need a spoonful of sugar.

Some cookies are inevitably going to be on the sweeter side to maintain their flavor profile. But I have tested our cookies extremely thoroughly, and they're all within 10g of brown sugar away from becoming mediocre in flavor. This is as much living on the edge as we'd like :) 

The other unfortunate side effect of lowering sweetness is a faster-staling cookie, and a less-crisp exterior. And we know from customer feedback that crisp exteriors are really essential to our pudges!

At the end of the day, we do what we can to balance sweetness with flavor, and hope our little graphic helps you to find the cookies you'll enjoy most!