Make Your Halloween Baked!

Our first Challenger in our 11th Annual Halloween Treat Challenge is a local cookie shop, Baked! of Bloomington. They are offering two design styles (Mummy and Grave) for their cookies to help you add some Halloween delight to your parties or simply your desserts. While we got their chocolate cookie dough to try out, they have several cookie doughs you can choose from. How many doughs? Nine! Eight regular and then the seasonal which is Pumpkin right now as I'm writing this. Two of their doughs are vegan and two are gluten free as well so these could please a lot of people in your life. I've never been disappointed by this shop's cookies and we've reviewed them previously here. Everything you see is edible, all of the decorations on each cookie. We received these three cookies for free so the company could enter our challenge. Let's see how the cookies do.

We'll start with the Mummy on Chocolate Cookie. This weighs about 59 grams. The white frosting is zigzagged across like bandages might be on a mummy. I like the little sugar eyes peeking out. My friend ate the Sugar Cookie version and liked it a lot. This one has just the chocolate dough which is a good counter flavor to the sugarly frosting; the chocolate is strong enough to be just slightly the more dominant flavor which is what we want here, right? The great thing about these Mummies is that they pack in one of the boxes from Baked! and do not suffer any damage in transportation so these are a great choice if you are having them delivered or you are taking them to a party. The frosting and eyes add textural difference but adding ingredients inside and on top of the cookies is part of Baked! appeal.

Now we'll move to the more heavily decorated Grave on Chocolate Cookie. The grave marker is basically sugar that softens a bit as you hold it in your mouth or chew. The marker and the cookie crumb dirt did come off as I took them home (which is why I took my photos in the shop. If that is a concern for your presentation, I'd go with the Mummy style. These however have the advantage of different sayings on the markers (I saw a couple of them at the shop) and even more sugar. I looked closely and the marker, dirt, and bones are stuck in chocolate frosting so for enjoying in the shop or if you can carefully transport them. The bones are a touch sweeter than the marker and more crunchy but the red came off on my fingers which actually only added to the creep factor. With all the decorations this cookie weighed 86 grams so substantially bigger than the Mummy. These have three types of chocolate -- cookie crumbs, base dough, and frosting! I could taste all three flavors when I took a bite. The crumbs and frosting added textures that made it very interesting even after I ate off the sugar decorations. I loved this!

In terms of chocolate, the Grave cookies were superior but you could probably add additional chocolate chips to the Mummy to up that chocolate intensity. In terms of safe and easy transport, I'd go with the Mummy style. Both are delicious Challengers for Halloween 2019!