SARAH BRUGGEMAN
Pastry Chef, Pangea Kitchen
When you’re browsing the display case in our bakery at Pangea, you can be sure to find it full of a wide variety of delicious desserts. One section that deserves a highlight is our amazing selection of fresh cookies. We have a dozen reasons to be excited about our cookies, and we’re here to share them with you!
At Pangea, we always strive to bring our customers the best. Tons of research is done online for our different cookie recipes, and we take those recipes and adapt and tweak them to fit our needs here. The four main cookies we offer are our Brown Butter Pecan Cookie, our Chocolate Chip Cookie, our Brown Butter Nutella Cookie with chocolate chips in it, and our Gluten Free Pecan Chocolate Chip Cookie! Those are the cookies you can always find in our display case. Let’s dive deeper into what makes each of these cookies unique!
Our Brown Butter Pecan Cookie is the first cookie I came up with for Pangea. Before we opened, I attended a class in Louisville with Stella Parks, who works for Serious Eats. The class was hosted at 610 Magnolia by Chef Edward Lee from Top Chef, so that was an amazing experience. One of the things Stella made was a brown butter cookie, and while that sounds really simple, browning the butter can completely change and enhance any recipe.
Anytime I make a recipe that requires melted butter, I will just go ahead and brown it because it makes it so much better.
The Brown Butter Pecan Cookie is one of our most popular cookies. It’s just delicious. I would say that one is Evansville’s favorite.
We enhance the flavor of our Chocolate Chip Cookie by using high quality milk chocolate and dark chocolate. So this gives you that classic chocolate chip cookie, but the nice chocolate really brings it to the next level. Next, we have our Brown Butter Nutella Cookie. For this recipe, we start by making a brown butter chocolate chip cookie. Then we take Nutella, pipe it into small disks, and freeze them. We then take the chocolate chip dough and wrap it around the frozen Nutella disks. When these cookies are baked and you break them open, you have the softened chocolate chips and the warm Nutella in the center. It’s delicious!
We also wanted to offer a gluten-free cookie option for our customers. The recipe we came up with tastes just like a brownie. We use cornstarch, butter, chocolate, and toasted pecans or walnuts to bring this cookie to life. When people see it they are usually hesitant because it’s gluten-free, but once you eat it you realize how amazing it tastes.
Throughout the year we will feature new types and flavors of cookies for special occasions. This past fall we made pumpkin chocolate chip cookies that were really soft and scrumptious. During the holidays we make vanilla bean sugar cookies. These cookies are classic sugar cookies enhanced with vanilla bean paste, so when you take a bite, the vanilla flavor really pops. We apply a vanilla bean glaze as well, and then we decorate them for each of the holidays.