Few cafés are sweeter than the Cosmic Cookie Jar. The colorful walls provide a treat for the eyes and the goods sold please the nose and taste buds.
This bakery on Deerfield Avenue in Shelburne Falls specializes in freshly prepared cookies, small-batch homemade ice cream and more.
The Cosmic Cookie Jar opened in late May in the spot that formerly housed Lindsay’s Emerald Store and Confections. Olga and Craig Jones, the husband-and-wife team behind the Cookie Jar, are pleased with the response to their enterprise so far.
The couple met in New York, where Olga Jones baked specialty cakes for weddings and birthdays. “It sounds silly, but wedding cakes are a lot of pressure,” she recalled in a recent interview.
She decided to try cookies instead.
“Cookies are so simple,” she enthused. “Everybody can afford a cookie. They make people happy.”
The Joneses decided to try out their cookie idea in Sonoma County, Calif., calling their enterprise the Cosmic Cookie Jar.
They started out baking what Craig Jones termed “straight” cookies. They soon decided to specialize in gluten-free cookies and eventually offered a host of cookie categories: egg-free, dairy-free and even “beegan” (vegan with honey).
“And then this thing called cheese bread came along,” explained Craig Jones.
While looking for gluten-free ideas, the two discovered a Brazilian roll called pao de queijo, or cheese bread. The pao is made with cassava root, or tapioca.
He explained that the pao was a street food originally made by slaves who worked to process cassava. At the end of the workday, the slaves used whatever crumbs remained on the floor of their workspace to make bread for their own consumption.
The cheese bread was a hit in California, and the Joneses make it every day in Shelburne Falls. They moved to the East Coast last year to be near family. They settled in Northampton and began selling pao de queijo at farmers’ markets in Hampshire County.
“When we got to Northampton, everybody said, ‘You have to go to Shelburne Falls,’” Craig Jones remembered. The two ended up going to the village sooner than they expected.
Looking for a commercial kitchen on Craigslist, they discovered the baking-cum-serving space in Shelburne Falls. “We saw the place and we stopped looking,” Olga Jones said with a smile. The Cosmic Cookie Jar was reborn.
The Cookie Jar’s emphasis has shifted back to include gluten, although some gluten-free cookies are offered each day. When photographer Paul Franz and I stopped by, we found eight flavors of regular cookies and three flavors without gluten.
Olga Jones does most of the baking and likes to make small batches of cookies throughout the day to please customers hungry for sweets fresh from the oven. “We try to give people what they want,” she told me.
She explained that the Cookie Jar’s most popular offering over the summer has been a do-it-yourself ice-cream sandwich. Customers get to select the cookies and ice-cream flavors they want in these frozen treats.
As fall approaches, Olga Jones will shift the menu to include more autumnal cookie and ice-cream flavors (think pumpkin, apple pie, caramel, cider) but also soups.
“Summer was good,” she noted,” but I’m personally looking forward to the fall, because I’ve missed it in California.”
Although the Joneses gave Paul and me samples of a number of delectable ice-cream flavors and even sent homemade peanut-butter biscuits to our dogs, the couple decided to share the recipe for the Brazilian bread with readers.
The bread comes together quickly and melts in the mouth. It may be varied; Craig Jones, who is the pao chef, sometimes adds blue cheese or goat cheese, a bit of jalapeno, and/or sundried tomato pesto to the batter. The plain cheese rolls are pretty terrific on their own, however.
The Cosmic Cookie Jar is open Thursday through Sunday from noon to 5 p.m.
Cosmic Pao de Queijo
1/2 cup olive oil
1/3 cup milk
1/3 cup water
2 cups tapioca flour
2/3 cup Parmesan cheese
2 eggs
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
In a saucepan, heat the oil, the milk and the water until they are just on the verge of boiling. Transfer them to a mixing bowl and stir in the tapioca flour and the salt. Let the mixture rest for 10 to 15 minutes.
Stir in the cheese and the eggs and combine well.
Drop rounded spoons full (about 2 tablespoons each) of the batter onto an ungreased cookie sheet or into ungreased mini-muffin pans. (Craig Jones prefers the muffin pans.)
Bake the breads until the tops are brown and the kitchen smells cheesy, about 15 to 20 minutes.
Makes 14 to 16 small breads.
Tinky Weisblat of Hawley is the author of “The Pudding Hollow Cookbook” and “Pulling Taffy.” If you have a suggestion for a future Blue Plate Special, please email Tinky at Tinky@TinkyCooks.com. For more information about Tinky, visit her website, www.TinkyCooks.com.