If you don't like Seoul, you might not have a Cookie.

Amongst the wave of Pan-Asian hyper-consumerism and subsequent racial stereotyping we goons in the West have thrown upon the kind and diverse people of that region, Koreans seem to have been tagged as the ugly stepchild to the Japanese. Perhaps it’s a lack of self-promotion on their part; more likely it’s because this creep is lurking about 40 minutes north of their capital city.

Either way, I’m here to set the record straight after a recent visit to Seoul to promote a little project. I wouldn’t say they’re necessarily cooler or more prescient when it comes to fashion trends than the Japanese, but at least the Koreans that I hung out with make up for it in spades with a rabid enthusiasm for pretty much everything to do with fashion.

This frenetic energy was infectious, and I found myself happily agreeing to things I never would, for example:



I don't do makeup. Yet here I am, at what couldn’t have been two hours after I hopped off a monster red eye from L.A., having some sort of white goop applied to my face in preparation for a photo shoot. On my right is Yunho - a.k.a. U-Know - who is like a Korean Backstreet Boy (which is a good thing there) and a pretty alright guy all around. They brought out some cookies for us to munch on while we waited for the first shot to be set up:



Not too promising. Let’s see.



Eh, a little stale. This brings me to the second quality I came to appreciate about my Korean brethren: their insistence on directness. They don’t want to hear that you love the cookie, they don’t want you to bow to them in thanks for the cookie, they just want to know if it sucks or not.

This refreshing lack of ceremony was further illustrated at lunch. There was a mysterious black button in the middle of our dining table, which my hosts explained was meant to call the waitress to avoid unnecessary waiting and insure an efficient lunch. I decided to perform an experiment to see just how effective this little bugger was:



I hereby move for every single restaurant in the entire world to have this on every table.

The rest of the day was spent in an endless stream of interviews and photo shoots, where I was accompanied by Shinyee-Lee, a.k.a., Olive Oil:





I instinctually granted her that nickname upon our first meeting; there’s just no mistaking that Korean Shelly Duvall vibe. Olive Oil was in charge of my schedule while I was there, and while she has nothing to do with cookies, I thought she deserved an honorable mention for her sweet smile and smart secretary looks.

During my last evening, I headed out on the town with my new friends from Vogue Korea to check out some traditional Korean street fare, when I noticed this:



Cookie? Well, something like it. I think. We’ll let this cat explain:



I still have no clue what he said, but if the “frenetic energy” part of the post didn’t come through clearly before, let this serve as exhibit A.

Le Notti de Cookie

Reporting from rainy Casale, Italy, where a cookie angel appeared out of nowhere to brighten our spirits after a marathon day of fall '11 fittings:



Amo questo biscotto! Porta a me, l'angelo di biscotto!

Nobody puts Cookie in the corner.

Thanksgiving is pretty much an unabashed carbohydrate orgasm, but cookies are forced to quietly take a back seat to inferior yet still valid flour-bombs like stuffing, mashed potatoes, mysterious gravy, banana cream pie, and whiskey sours.

Thank goodness for Max – nephew, cookie monster, all around cool dude- who had the good sense to sneak a pack of Oreos® out of the cupboard when dessert just wasn’t hitting the spot. Here’s what he had to say:



His sister Lindsay, on the other hand, wasn’t so enthusiastic:



Perhaps she’s more of a Chips Ahoy gal.

NYFW: Day Six/Post Five, The Countdown Begins

Okay guys. The big night is almost upon us. In less than 3 days, it's Fashion's turn to shine. It's The taking of Fashion, 1, 2, 3! Nobody puts Fashion in the corner! Fashion just wants to have fun! Here's looking at you, Fashion! Fashion, you're a star!

Okay, stopping that now. As you all probably know by now, this Friday is Fashion's Night Out. And how are we celebrating at Band of Outsiders? With a COOKIE, duh. But, wait...not just ANY cookie. A very, very special cookie. A cookie to end all cookies. One singular cookie sensation (sorry, last one).

Christina Tosi, aforementioned Level 8 cookie thetan, has concocted an exclusive cookie treat for the night - the Gold Gilt Gangster:



The ingredients of this cookie will remain a mystery, but this much I can tell you now: Ms. Tosi will be only be making 113 of these little buggers, and after Friday will NEVER MAKE THIS COOKIE RECIPE AGAIN. As a means of proof to all of your jealous friends that you are in fact one of the lucky 113, with your purchase of the Gangster you will become one of 113 proud owners of this:



That's right: a one time, exclusive taste sensation and a t-shirt featuring a stuffed blue animal with googly eyes wearing a bow tie and mauling a cookie could be yours in less than 3 short days. This is all happening here, where we'll be with our buds at Opening Ceremony from around 6pm - 12pm. You can read more about all of the details here.

Nicole will be manning the fort while I troll the lobby in a scuba mask, spraying innocent bystanders with a water pistol filled with Drakkar Noir. We thought it would really round out things to somehow incorporate a cookie monster costume, perhaps on a slightly chubby small child, but a quick google search yielded this:



Which is just creepy.

NYFW: Day Four/Post Four

Slow day in cookie news, folks. Super busy casting, but snuck in an oatmeal raisin around 4pm while tightening up the Boy. looks:



Confession: I feel like oatmeal raisin cookies would be markedly better without raisins. There, I said it.

NYFW: Day Three/Part Three

This is a cookie plate (of sorts) at Torrisi, a supremely awesome Italian restaurant somewhere close to my hotel:



This is me genuinely enjoying it:



This is Remington mocking said enjoyment:



and this is Tina after what couldn't have been more than half a glass of wine:

Road to Redemption: NYFW Day Two/Post Two

I'm back, as promised, with a report on day two of what is turning out to be a generally non-suicidal fashion week. Today was the first day of women's looks with Tina - friend, stylist, cookie comrade.

Tina makes work more fun and intense because she feels everything as much or more than you right while it's happening. Here's she is (left) with Grace, our sweet looks model for the day, both wearing stuff from the new line that didn't make the cut for the show:



Yesterday's theme of super serious fashion conversation continued, but with more severity and much better words to describe things that were ugly. Lunch came mid-day courtesy of Westville, which everyone decided was very "me" food (read: simple. I've clearly made a strong impression.).

First and foremost, what I really appreciated about Westville was how they went out of their way with the presentation of the food. For instance, this bag of greasy french fries cookies:



No. No, no, no. I'm out.

We found ourselves in the East Village for dinner, which meant there was no escaping the draw, the mythical allure, the centripetal force of...



a.k.a...



Momofuku Milk Bar is the New World Order of Cookie. Christina Tosi, the genius behind it, is like our generation's Willy Wonka, or head supreme Keebler Elf, but she's a girl, and she's real. Milk Bar is like her Chocolate Factory or forest cookie tree house, or whatever. The stuff she comes up with completely blows my mind. Her recipes demonstrate the same type of creativity that inspires me about great art or design, BUT YOU CAN EAT THEM. Which is cool. And fattening.

There we were, on 13th street and 2nd avenue, stuffed like fat donkeys after a perfectly satisfying dinner, yet waiting in a formidable line for corn cookies and something called a birthday truffle. Tina kept going on about how they were going right in her freezer, which I found particularly amusing.

You might have heard of a little event we held in conjunction with MMB last year around this time, or another pretty special one that's coming up at the end of next week.

More on that soon...

Road to Cookie Redemption: NYFW, Day One/Post One

ALRIGHT I won't even insult you with an excuse.

Here I am, kind readers and fellow cookie lovers, crawling back to you in shame, asking for your forgiveness and pledging my renewed attention. It's New York Fashion Week, after all, which means...um...

Anyway, today was the first "looks" day. This is when we sit around and try every single item of clothing we've been working on for the past six months on a model, every which way, while applying the UTMOST IMPORTANCE to all of it. The goal, of course, is for a fashion show to materialize. It's at once fun, fascinating, exhausting, and mildly boring.

The bright spot of the looks days is working on the guys stuff with my boy Remington, our trusty looks model for about 2 years now. Rem shares my love of cookies and foot massages and has a food blog of his own, which you can find here.

We decided to start the day with a clear favorite, the classic Snickerdoodle, which I nabbed from Whole Foods first thing this morning on a "fruit run".



It was immediately evident that these were yesterday's Snickerdoodles. That being said, we couldn't deny the super satisfying yummy factor. These suckers were tasty, crusty edge or not. The brief 'doodle sesh was followed by a few hours of saying things like "but the yellow shoe really makes it feel more pulled together" and debating the pronunciation of the word "madras".

Onto lunch: Carry-in from 'Wichcraft. I'm really into witches so I don't even mind the stupid pun, but I have to say the oatmeal creamwich I ordered for dessert left something to be desired:



It's hard to tell from this photograph, but that's an apple in his left hand and a tiny little whisper of a cookie about to enter his mouth in his right. And the thing is, there already is an oatmeal creamwich, and Little Debbie has been making it for 500 years, and it's 3 times bigger, and it doesn't suck. (Author's Note: my tuna sandwich was awesome.)

Rem and I ended the long day pretending to understand what we were screaming to each other over dinner at an extremely loud place where the waiters all have beards called The Breslin. Redemption in the form of a cookie plate?



Little Jam Cookie: Not sweet enough, good texture, wish it was corn meal based.
Slicey thing that looks like a Lemon Square: Psych! It's shortbread. And it's the best thing on the plate.
Chocolate Chunk: Has a funk. Gross. Truly. We skipped it.
Cranberry Cratery Guy: Really good, mild, surprising.
Double Chocolate: see Chocolate Chunk. Ew.

Not quite. I soldier on...

Le Cookie Quotidien: Fork shown for scale.

Alex Israel writes in about one of my standby's, the prodigious chocolate chip megacookie from Le Pain Quotidien (a.k.a. overpriced fake french place with awkward banquet table, loud babies, and free Nutella if you know to ask for it):



Le Pain's chocolate chip cookie is, in a word: huge (five cookies in one, at least). Other words I'd use to describe it: thin, crispy, and of course, organic. I feel that I too often face the "fork" in the cookie road: thin vs. thick (which often translates into enough vs. not enough to satisfy a cookie craving). At Le Pain, this regrettable binary dissolves into a kind of perfect cookie compromise: thin and giant. Goodbye fork--Hello cookie!

"Le Pain" is for cookies, and that's good enough for me!


Well then it's good enough for me too, dude.

It's a Cookie Affair

It's always nice when family checks in to remind you that you're still a complete child (writing a blog about cookies is of course no indication of this at all).

Nicole's Nana, Elaine, sent over a batch of her famous Potato Chip Butter Cookies in this:



That would be one of those return address stickers that come free in the mail with your contribution to the local Rotary club or annual Policeman's ball. Genius. Apparently Nicole hadn't returned Nana's tupperware the last go 'round and she was not very happy about it. The cookies?



Insane. Ridiculous. Perfection. Sugarbutterballs with a salty potato chip crunch biting through their sublime smoothness. While I cannot overstate how effing good these were, it must be noted that these go beyond fattening. These ARE fat - you eat them and a portion of fat the exact size and shape of the cookie will appear somewhere on your body within 48 hours.

Not to be outdone, Maureen - aka my Mom - was in town the next week and brought these little guys by the studio:



However much I wanted to resent her for giving me exactly what I wanted exactly when I wanted it and therefore negating any sense of adulthood or self-sufficiency I had developed over the past 35 years, they were so good that I just shut up and ate like 10 of them on the spot. I mean, they were still WARM for god's sake. The woman doesn't screw around.

We love you Mom and Nana,
xxScott & Nicole


.

Cookie, Interrupted.

Okay, I SUCK. Busy few weeks trying to do things that (gasp!) don't involve cookies, namely:

1. Watching Lost.



Lost had its big series finale a while back, which meant I could finally start watching it from the beginning. You see, I prefer my low culture entertainment to be completely time-shifted - not by Tivo's wimpy standard of a few hours or days, but by at least several years.

Lost is everything I dreamed it would be and more. Science fiction - and the dime story mythology that supports it - has an obsessive effect on me. I watched the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy at least 32 times between February and December of 2004. And I have no memories of two entire days last week that don't involve an island, Matthew Fox, and a thick waft of black smoke that makes jungle trees bend.

It's important to note that I'm on Season 3 episode 13 and there's yet to be one cookie sighting on the Island, and these people totally have real food by this point:



Coincidence? Hmmm....


2. Not getting fat.



I have nothing to do with this photograph. That's what you get when you type "fat cookie" into a google image search. I swear.


3. Making clothes.

Lately I've been feeling a lot like this guy:



Someone's gotta make the friggin donuts. I realize I'm mixing dessert metaphors now, but while I'm at it, I can't NOT post this:



Alright dude, focus. Back to cookies.

Girl Scout Season, Part 3: Goodbyes.

Girl Scout Cookie Season seems to have come and gone. So, at this point we can be honest: the cookies are bunk. I don't remember them sucking this much. They're like weird, chemical-laden facsimiles of the GSC's I remember, with super lame names that I'm too embarrassed to type here. They should do a collab with Whole Foods next time and hire Yoko Ono to come up with the names.

Anyway, I came across this video, which is about saying goodbye Girl Scouts Style:



Well, she sure makes that all sound like fun. The word maudlin came to mind when watching this, which is okay because I really like that word.

Alright, until next year my little green scouts...

Halfsies

This is a plate of cookies:



This is a plate of cookies when two perfectly insane people share it for dessert:

Mile High Cookie

What better way to pass the time on an 8 hour transcontinental flight while dangerous plumes of Volcanic ash loom underneath than a cookie?



This Delta freebie - a surprisingly perfect, consistently crunchy graham cracker cookie - almost made me forget that the world was coming to an end a few miles below.

Girl Scout Season, Part 2: Thin Mint Photo Shoot.

Dave Franco: actor, Thin Mint fan.

Domo Arigato, Mr. Cookie

Konnichiwa, cookie lovers. Apologies for my extended absence. I spent a week or so in Tokyo and, as my dear Japanese friends would say, got the jet rag. Alas, I am back in action with a report from the trip.

Needless to say, this ain't cookie country folks. Generally, this is what you'll find while walking around:



Or, on equally colorful note:



That would be a truck passing by on the way to Starbucks my first morning. I couldn't tell if it was a mere advertisement or if they were actually cutting hair in Edward Scissorhands shapes INSIDE the moving truck, which of course would be amazing.

Anyway, by lunch on the first day I needed a taste of home so headed straight for Opening Ceremony in Shibuya. The shop is so completely impressive and cool; floors and floors of OC goodness with a new restaurant in the basement called Potluck. A warm feeling overcame me when I saw this at the counter:





Um, I think they meant to write "DRY CRACKERS". Buzzkill.

A few days later, the guys from Honeyee.com came by Guthrie for a Polaroid polo shoot. This is Suzuki-san, the editor-in-chief, who is much cooler than me:



And these are the cookies he brought as a kind offering:



A for effort and of course design (sailboats!). C minus for taste and texture. At that, I ate the entire box. No joke. This was the closest thing to bread I'd seen in almost a week and had to take advantage of the situation.

On the last night, when all hope was lost, my buddy Kun's sister Yuri presented me with this little jar of goodness:




These were perfect little crispy cookies of the olive oil (vs. butter) variety, and my carbohydrate deprived Japanese friends and I ate them up before we could say:



Arigato Gozaimasu Yuri!!!

And back at the home office...

Dear Intern Who Made The Trader Joe's Run Last Week,

Kudos on stocking up the kitchen upon my return from New York.



Word of note: when your boss writes a cookie blog, perhaps you should consider a cookie option on your grocery list.

Warmest,
SS

Girl Scout Season, Part 1

Walking to a casting this morning, I noticed this:



Game on, bitches.

Find out where to order here.

Marina Del Cookie

Dave Franco reports from our Spring look book shoot in the Marina:



(Minor bag malfunction.)

Downward Facing Cookie

Left the office for a company lunch last Thursday and on the way back we made a quick stop at Golden Bridge for cookies. Golden Bridge is to Yoga in L.A. what a Mega Church is to Jesus in, well, L.A.

Full disclosure: I hate yoga. This is primarily because I suck at it. Needless to say, you'd be hard pressed to find me there in patchouli paradise if it weren't for trusty Nicole, who swears by their chocolate chip cookie.

So, here we are at the counter:



Maybe it's just me, but it's not the most JOYFUL row of cookies. Wheat free! Vegan! Yipee! Anyway, I go in for my gluten-free choco chip (right, foreground):



Now, I don't know what "gluten" is exactly, but I suspect there's a direct correlation between it and a little something I like to call "flavor". On a positive note, the texture was awesome. Chewy like soft caramel without being sticky, and full of super doughy craters, I finished the damn thing before I even knew it.

Namaste, Nicole.

Hyperbo-Cookie

Stopped by Starbucks this afternoon for an iced coffee (yes, people, you read right: ICED. Los Angeles is a special place in the winter) and immediately noticed this:



OUTRAGEOUS, huh? Fine, you've got me. Now explain yourself:



Oh, Natalie. I do appreciate the effort, but you've got to do better than that. I've tasted it by this point and it's nothing more than a decent oatmeal raisin cookie with, like, 50 too many raisins. Yuck.



For some reason, it also brings to mind what that red headed guy from thirtysomething would look like if he were a cookie:



Wait, wasn't he also Poindexter in Revenge of the Nerds?



This cookie IS outrageous.

For Your Cookie

A live report and photo feed from Bettina Korek at the Tower Bar:



"Ice cream sandwhich at the sunset tower. This is a very good use of chocolate chip cookies. It's been on the menu a month and, according to the waiter, has surpassed chocolate cake in popularity. Very into this."

Clearly, B. Enjoy.

Koo Koo Doodles

What do super tasty, marginally healthy roasted chicken dinners with yummy sides of mac and cheese, roasted garlic potatoes, and...err, can I get two helpings of mac and cheese please?...have to do with cookies, let alone SNICKERDOODLES? In this case, I say WHO CARES? Koo Koo Roo offers up a splendidly buttery take on the classic doodle that almost usurps the need for a chicken dinner altogether. Light on the cinnamon, heavy on the dairy, they bake these to premature, doughy perfection. As with any franchise cookie, one has to expect a certain level of inconsistency, but that's nothing a simple middle-cookie-touch-test can't help overcome. I'll take two please.