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The Cookie Tin Will Not Be Put in a Box
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The Cookie Tin Will Not Be Put in a Box
The cookie tin has come a long way from the days of Royal Dansk—ubiquitous tins filled with butter cookies molded by factory machinery into a variety of cheerful shapes. On account of a pandemic that put pastry chefs out of work and forced restaurants to build new revenue streams, bakers have started to curate carefully designed boxes filled with creative combinations like lemon honey butter mochi next to miso butterscotch cookies, or browned butter snickerdoodles next to cashew-coconut-date bars. They’re breaking free from the month of December (and all the obligatory stale gingerbread that comes with it) to deliver year-round treats that are handmade, oftentimes seasonal, and far more unique than what you can find in the cookie aisle of the grocery store. In other words: it’s the cookie tin’s time to shine.Get more news about fancy cookie tin box,you can vist our website!
“Over the last year, we’ve all tried to figure out ways to connect to each other remotely,” says Laurie Ellen Pellicano, a baker, recipe developer, food stylist, and pastry consultant who cut her teeth at the original Tartine in San Francisco and launched her namesake cookie tin business in early December of last year. “And that’s created an interesting food economy.” Pellicano’s impetus for the project, which sells trios of cookies for $45 and ships them nationally (in addition to offering local pickup and delivery in Brooklyn), came from a desire to meld her cross-disciplinary culinary background into a fulfilling year-round business. She decided to go all in on building imaginative cookie recipes, like a shortbread inspired by the orange-flavored Milanos she grew up eating, or buttons flavored with raspberry, hibiscus, and the cured sumac she adores from Burlap & Barrel.
When the acclaimed baker Melissa Weller closed High Street on Hudson, the West Village bistro where she was the head baker and partner, at the beginning of the pandemic, she found herself in a similar headspace to Pellicano. “I was really frustrated in terms of what to do, because I’ve been in the restaurant industry for such a long time, and I’m a baker. Baking programs were always getting cut because of budget, and I always felt like [my job] was on the line,” she recalls over the phone. Furthermore, Weller was burnt out from years of managing teams tasked with making fresh, jam-filled kouign-amann and baguettes every morning. “I thought, this is really exhausting, and I’m getting older, and I want to have my own business, but I wanted it to be a really smart business,” she says.
As she was exploring the possibilities of creating a scalable, packaged baked good, she did a one-day pop-up at the Musket Room where she produced a Japanese-inspired holiday cookie tin. “It was so much fun, and it was so creative, and I actually made some money on it,” she remembers of the event that sold 49 tins and 1,000 cookies in total. “Why don’t I think about how I might want to do this myself?” Funk Foods Bakery was born in April as a cookie tin company with monthly rotating flavors, offering local pickup in Brooklyn and nationwide shipping. The first iteration was bar-themed and featured items like pretzel shortbread and tahini-halva blondies, while May focused on Mother’s Day with double chocolate drops, violet sugar swirls, and lemon bars.
Why cookies, and why now? Unlike other semi-viral, and specific, sweets like Basque cheesecake and cardamom buns, cookies are extraordinarily extensible in nature. “It’s like a blank canvas that is both comforting and unassuming,” says Dave Dreifus, the chef who cofounded Best Damn Cookies with entrepreneur Mo Sahoo during the pandemic. “I’m blown away by how many different ways you can make cookies.” And, as Pellicano notes, “Cookies are a tradition that spans across the entire world.”
This is why Bowl Cut Table, a cooking collective of eight Asian American female friends whose professional backgrounds traverse a variety of different industries (which includes TASTE editor Tatiana Bautista), started selling dessert boxes in September of 2020. Prior to the pandemic, Bowl Cut Table’s focus was on hosting family-style dinner parties and ticketed cooking workshops, but as the Black Lives Matter movement gained steam last summer, they were motivated to activate within the ongoing struggle for racial justice. “We felt like we needed to implement our feelings and our commitment within our identities into action,” recounts Sophia Rhee, a collective member who is an environmental social science researcher by day. “Our conversations became about what we could do to tangibly help this moment. How can we raise money to raise awareness? The idea for dessert boxes came to be because they’re discreet, they’re sellable, you can pass them off and stay socially distanced,” she says.