Sometimes our designer Zach will throw us curve balls, like when he got everyone together for lunch on the roof. Well, the other week he suggested we have a cookie bake-off. Granted, a better idea had never been spouted on a random weekday, but it was extra enticing coming from a man in cat socks.
Talk ensued, excitement built, a ranking system was chosen, and The Royal Crumble was born.
Cookie day started like any other Friday, with everyone digging through emails, strategizing the morning’s workload and drinking cup after cup after cup of coffee. The only real difference was the mountain of baked goods growing in the break room.
And what a delicious-looking mountain it was! To avoid twelve variations of chocolate chip, cookie styles were claimed in advance, and if someone was already brining Snickerdoodles, Snickerdoodles were crossed off the list. After all, we are a creative agency. If someone wasn’t able to dream up an original treat, or a clever twist on a classic, they were in the wrong competition. (Also…Pinterest.)
After lunch it was time to summit Pastry Peak, but I’ll spare you the details. All I’m going to say is crumbs flew, strawberry milk flowed, faces and hands were streaked with chocolate, and cookie piles were wrecked by pushy, sweet-craving hands.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BC0etZANjtP/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=embed_locale_test
The sugar high was evident, the company-wide crash imminent, productivity was doomed, and the results were as follows:
2nd place (TIE!): John Rippy with his Brown Sugar Cashew Cookies.
This was John’s first foray into baking, and with this accomplishment he’s proven himself multi-talented (and quite the homemaker!). Or maybe we should chalk this win up to beginner’s luck?
2nd place (TIE!): Amy Ross with her Quadruple Chocolate Soft Fudgy Pudding Cookies.
Amy decided to stack the deck by making not one, not two, not three, but FOUR different cookies. After all of that hard work, if she hadn’t placed we may have seen some real tears.
1st place: Colette with her Chai Spice Cookies.
In the past year or two Colette has brought in all sorts of goodies (like quinoa brittle, which is actually much better than it sounds), and she has done so unprovoked. So it wasn’t a surprise to anyone when she took home cookie gold.
So where do we go from here? No other competition will ever be as sweet. No other get-together will leave us so bouncy, so awake. We will one day try to replicate that feeling when you’ve had about six cookies too many, and yet you still see yourself reaching for another…and you just don’t even care. For that moment we were young and wired and free.
Too many sweets will do that to you. Well, that and diabetes.
