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Dessert
Andrea’s Cookies
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Talk about tough choices.
Andrea’s Cookies, a cookie shop/kitchen on Bloor West, is all about them.
The first and most pressing tough choice is the one you face when you walk up to the glass window, with its tantalizing display of freshly baked cookies, and have to decide what flavour(s) to choose.
All in all, there are two dozen permanent and seasonal flavours, ranging from salted toffee and Rocky Road to strawberry milkshake and brown and butter triple chocolate. Thankfully, Andrea herself makes it (somewhat) easier for you to narrow down the choices by offering a curated selection of six flavours that rotates every week.
While mulling over the options, here’s what to know about Andrea’s Cookies:
They are not all-natural-and-organic, sustainably-sourced, sugar-free, gluten-free and calorie-free.
They are not light and airy, dainty and delicate, crispy or crunchy.
They don’t incorporate unpronounceable techniques or technologies. And they’re definitely not minimalist.
Nor do they come in viral, rarefied, of-the-moment flavours such as matcha, yuzu, cardamom and lavender.
They’re sweet and gooey, soft and chewy, lip-smacking and stomach-stretching (in the best ways possible).
Ingredients and flavours run towards the tried-and-true, classic and crowd-(and kid)-pleasing, sugar-fix satisfying and nostalgia-inciting.
Also happily present are nuts and sprinkles, caramel and sea salt, Reese’s pieces and Oreo chunks, Cadbury Mini Eggs and Ferrero Rocher nuggets, not to mention exquisitely piped buttercream.
On the surface these cookies are disarmingly pretty, But warning: as soon you get your hands on one, it’s going to get messy. You’ll have gotten off easy if you polish one off and all you have to show for your feat is melted chocolate all over your hands (and mouth and shirt). This is because chances are perilously high that, upon biting into one, some unexpected hidden filling – cream cheese, Nutella, Biscoff cookie cream – will scrumptiously ooze out and begin flowing all over the place, like rich, lickable lava.
It’s no exaggeration to say that, in today’s increasingly messed up world, Andrea’s Cookies are the best kind of mess you can get into. That they are in this world at all is the result of another tough choice.
In truth, Andrea’s Cookies wouldn’t even exist if the Andrea in question, founder and baker Andrea Mears, hadn’t been laid-off from her corporate job in early Covid days. Like many confronted with sudden free time and a small measure of despair, she did the most sensible thing she could: she baked.
“It seemed as if everyone was baking, but it also seemed as if everyone was doing bread,” she recalls, “So I said to myself, ‘You know what? I’m just going to do cookies.’”
Mears had been an avid cookie-holic and cookie-baker since childhood. So there was a real comfort factor built into baking up a sweet and gooey storm during a pandemic. In the early months of 2020, she photographed her creations, and, on a whim, offered them for sale on her Instagram account, musing philosophically, “If people want them, great. If not, all good.”
It turned out that people wanted them, so bad that by the summer of 2020, Mears was forced to create a website to streamline the ordering process. Even then, her freshly-baked batches were selling out within minutes of emerging from the oven.
At this point, you may be asking yourself: “How is it that Andrea’s Cookies were selling like hotcakes, including to a vast number of customers who had never even tasted them?”
The answer is that, aside from tasting delicious, Andrea’s cookies are insanely photogenic.
In addition to her prowess and passion as a cookie baker, Mears is an accomplished cookie decorator, photographer/videographer and Instagrammer, with a background in PR and marketing to boot. In the early days, she had so many people re-posting her cookie pics and commenting, “Andrea, these are so beautiful!” that it amounted to free advertising.
On the subject of tough choices, a particularly difficult one loomed when, with Covid on the wane, businesses finally started opening up in Toronto. Mears was confronted with a life-altering decision: return to the corporate work force or throw caution to the wind (and dough in the oven) and open up a brick-and-mortar cookie store.
“Was it a tough decision? Honestly, no, because I loved this so much,” confesses Mears. “It was scary, but it wasn’t tough. I was very ready to do it.”
She found the perfect spot, a bright and cheery space with windows facing south onto Bloor. The only drawback was that the single room – much of it dominated by an immaculate kitchen – is also pretty small.
Small enough that the only tables and chairs available are those placed out on the sidewalk when the weather gets warm.
Small enough that there isn’t room for a coffee machine (although in the summer, the resourceful staff, after zesting rind for the lemon poppyseed cookies, use the leftover “naked” lemons to make refreshing berry lemonade).
Small enough that there’s only so much space to roll out, bake, frost, decorate and package up to 800 cookies a day. Which is why Mears limits herself to the six rotating flavours every week, with the exception of the always present, ever-popular chocolate chunk. It’s also why – for now – Andrea’s physical storefront is only open for business on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. (although plans for expanded days, hours and space are in the works).
Currently, Mears estimates that 40 percent of her business comes from online orders (aside from sold singly – in sleeves – cookies are sold in boxes of three, six and 12). Every Monday, amid considerable anticipation, she posts that week’s sextet of flavours online. Customers have 48 hours to mull over the possibilities and make the aforementioned tough choices before Wednesday at 9 a.m., when the site opens up for orders, which can then be picked up, or delivered, during opening hours.
Yet, even without an indoor space, an impressive number of walk-bys – particularly regulars from the neighbourhood and High Park – has spawned an Andrea’s Cookies “community”.
“The window is great,” admits Mears. “People love to hang out outside and chat with the staff. I recently looked at the numbers and realized that 50 percent of the people who come here are repeat customers, which is really cool.”
There are reasons for the repeats:
Each differently flavoured dough is made fresh every Tuesday and Wednesday, doubly-chilled, then baked in small batches, with never more than 12 perfectly uniform cookies – (each weighs exactly 95 grams) – on one pan. Mears notes, “We put a ton of work into the dough-making process and I think people can tell.”
The cookies are slightly under-baked so that they’ll possess a soft, chewy texture, one that actually stays soft for days (in an airtight container, Andrea’s cookies stay fresh for up to five days).
Chocolate (in various guises; there’s almost always chocolate) is put on top of the cookie before baking, creating a significant textural difference: the first bite you take isn’t cookie-ish, but chocolatey.
Here are some of the most popular flavours: Biscoff cookie batter. Cinnamon roll. Red velvet with cream cheese. Birthday cake. Ferrero Rocher with Nutella. What they have in common is that people recognize – and love them. “We want them to be special, but not crazy,” sums up Mears.
An absence of “crazy” doesn’t mean an absence of creativity. Mears is constantly looking to bring new flavours into the fold. Although cookies might not seem super complicated, the journey from Andrea’s imagination to your cookie jar is more complex than it may seem.
An example is the coconut cream pie cookie. “Everyone loves chocolate, but coconut is a harder sell if you’re not already a coconut lover.”
To get reluctant coconut eaters on board, Mears designed a cookie that goes full-on coconut. The dough is filled with shredded coconut and white chocolate. After baking, it’s blanketed in a rich coconut cream cheese butter cream, which is then sprinkled with toasted coconut. From inspiration to realization was an unusually quick process. “After the second draft it was ready to go,” says Mears.
More arduous was the popular honey cornbread cookie. Containing cornmeal and honey, the dough, which Mears originally made at home, proved challenging to recreate in an industrial oven. It took her five weeks of tweaking and taste-testing to get it right.
“And if a cookie’s not perfect, we’re not putting it in the window.”
Does such rigorous quality control mean that Mears and her staff are obliged to conduct taste tests on a constant basis?
Mears laughs. “That’s the best part.”
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