Food Review: Cookie Good

By ALISON ROWE | Special to the Palisadian-Post

Photos by Rich Schmitt | Staff Photographer

Ross Canter was walking in circles with a placard when he realized that he would rather be making cookies. It was 2007, the year of the writer’s strike, and Ross, a successful screenwriter, was feeling the pain. Suddenly the dream of running a little bakeshop didn’t seem so fanciful.

Baking had always been part of Ross’ life. His wife, Melanie, confided that he presented her with a cheesecake brownie on their second date, but his misgivings about selling cookies were that “it would be hard to bake for people I don’t know.” His approach had always been emotional rather than scientific.

As a scion of the family who ran Canter’s Deli, he remembered going to the Boyle Heights Deli with his grandfather, but the delights of the bakery cabinets were not for him. His parents were early advocates of the health food movement and sugar was frowned upon.

“In my own house there was not a lot of baking. Growing up in the ’70s we had Stella D’oro cookies. They were more like packing peanuts,” he said, surrounded by the most lavish, flavor-filled cookies I have ever seen.

Melanie took up the story of how the kitchen in their Marquez Knolls home then turned into the first staging post for the Cookie Good empire.

“[Fellow Palisadian] J.J. Abrams was one of the first cookie clients, and he got us into the shipping business,” she explained. On their second week, he placed an order for 20 two-dozen boxes to be shipped to New York.

The Canters had never shipped their cookies before, so they rapidly devised packing and sent the first parcel to themselves to find out how it held up.

“I drop kicked it across the post office so I could really see it get beat up,” Melanie said with a laugh. Having survived the shipping test, their company grew.

The couple credited the Abrams with raising the bar for the business.

“When someone asks you to do something, it presses you up to the wall and you find out what you can do,” the couple said, such as the time when a friend asked for one of their non-existent bacon maple cookies. That was when the Pancakes and Bacon cookie came into being—a loving rendition of Sunday morning, with the Canter’s favorite fluffy pancake dough, featuring bacon, caramelized in brown sugar, and a salted maple-syrup glaze, made glorious with sour cream.

Further sweet-savory experiments yielded the Cheetos Cookies, one of my favorites—and so much better than its namesake crunchy snack. It has the signature orange coating but then a dairy creaminess that hits all the right notes between salt and sweet. A revelation.

New cookies are premiered as inspiration strikes. The Mac’n’Cheese Cookie didn’t make it out of the research stage. The Cap’n Crunch did.

The whole family was involved in the business. The couple’s two children came home from Palisades Charter High School at night and joined the production line.

One birthday treat for the Canter kids was to design the signature cookies that still feature on the menu: the Mia and the Gabe.

Their friend, Jake, diagnosed with celiac disease at age 12, was not barred from the fun. He designed the first Cookie Good gluten-free offering, a delicious mix of dark and milk chocolate chips, peanut butter cups, honey roasted peanuts, gluten-free pretzels and marshmallows. The Jake more than holds its own with the other cookies and is the cookie that got the most attention among my informal testers.

The store’s most popular cookie is the Caramel-Pretzel-Chocolate Chunk. With the pretzels providing a salty, crisp counterpoint to the gently oozing, melted caramel, this cookie is an irresistible combination of flavor and sensation.

It also features in the range of cereal milks the store offers. In a truly original addition to the menu, cookies are infused into milk, or “pre-dunked.” The chilled, flavored milk comes in four varieties and has a more complex profile than chocolate milk, which is its nearest cousin.

The cookie menu says a lot about the Canters’ approach to baking and the visions it conjures of a classic American childhood. S’mores around a summer campfire, birthday cake, Lucky Charms at breakfast, and milk and cookies before bed. Memory is intimately connected with taste and smell, and it is the essence of a happy family that is captured here.

The store itself is a hub of activity. The huge, arching window looks out across Wilshire at Douglas Park, which teems with children and seniors playing on the lawn.

Friends and ex-staff pop in to share news. It is more than the cookies that are offered in the Santa Monica store. Somehow the Canters have created a sense of welcome, and the deeply comforting flavors of the happiest times in our lives.