Snider Plaza bakery puts a gourmet spin on homestyle favorites

Snider Plaza bakery puts a gourmet spin on homestyle favorites

12:11 PM CDT on Thursday, July 2, 2009

By TINA DANZE / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

There's so much more to Crème de la Cookie than the name conveys. Although the new Snider Plaza bakery does sell some great, home-style cookies – such as a spicy ginger variety with crystallized ginger bits – the filled cupcakes, gourmet Whoopie Pies and other rich confections are the showstoppers.

EVANS CAGLAGE/DMN

If you need a sugar fix, head to Snider Plaza for Crème de la Cookie's cookies or Whoopie Pies.

Owner Toni Rivard says her philosophy is to prepare homespun recipes using gourmet ingredients such as European butter and Callebaut chocolate.

It's the first commercial venture for Rivard, an award-winning home baker, who co-owns the shop with her husband, Steve. Rivard comes from a long line of Illinois farm women for whom scratch baking was both a fact of life and a passion.

"I didn't even know what a boxed cake mix was until we moved to California," she confesses. Fifteen years ago, after Rivard beat out a cruise line pastry chef for the grand prize in Mission Viejo's citywide chocolate cake competition, she swore that one day she'd have her own bakery. Now she does.

Rivard's Whoopie Pies leave their mass-produced forebears in the dust. She uses her chocolate cake recipe for the base and folds melted marshmallow into the rich buttercream filling between the cake halves. Her chocolate-peanut butter cupcakes are that same chocolate cake, this time with a decadent peanut-butter buttercream center, a chocolate ganache glaze and a peanut-butter cup perched on top.

Smaller, but richer, are the Screamin' O's – fudgy rounds of espresso-spiked brownie topped with chocolate ganache and rimmed with French chocolate sprinkles.

Each day, the bakery will feature eight to10 varieties of cupcakes ($3.25 for filled cupcakes, $2.75 for regular); six to eight varieties of cookies ($1.25); several kinds of brownies and bars ($2); and its signature Whoopie Pies ($2.75) and Screamin' O's ($2). Gourmet coffee drinks made with Intelligentsia brand coffee complete your dessert binge, which you can enjoy in the cozy seating area or order to go.

Tina Danze is a Dallas freelance writer.

COOKIE TIME

Crème de la Cookie (cremedelacookie.com) is at 6706 Snider Plaza. Call 214-265-5572 to place orders. Open Monday through Saturday, 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.

DON'T MISS: from-scratch Whoopie Pies and the Screamin' O's

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