Posted by admin on Feb 5, 2011 in Chocolate, Chocolate Chip | 0 comments

Mother’s Bistro & Bar
212 SW Stark St – Portland
$1.50

Not that it should be surprising that you would find a great cookie at Mother’s. I mean, this is a place that is known and loved in Portland for it’s top notch comfort food. Also,  I’m pretty sure a place that calls itself “Mother’s” is legally obliged to provide not just cookies, but super awesome, homemade-y gems like the ones goin’ on here. The thing is, Mother’s is a full-fledged, (quite lovely) sit-down restaurant –  not a bakery, per se – or a coffee shop where you might think to pop in and grab a cookie to go. But you can.  You totally CAN!

This is something I found out by accident a couple of months ago one evening when I wasn’t even on the cookie prowl. However, walking by the dessert case on the way into the joint, I spied the impressive-looking cookies and bought one to go. It was a ginger molasses number of substantial heft and way-above average flavor and texture, studded with candied ginger. Truly aces, and more on that later because that ginger molasses definitely deserves its own post.

But the one I want to tell you about right now is this chocolate whammy that I nearly passed up because, frankly, it looked sort of dry and cakey to the naked eye (see photo below) – like maybe it had been sittin’ around the pastry case a little too long. (I was in there just after they’d closed and was graciously allowed inside in order to fulfill my late-night cookie jones on the way home from an woefully austere supper. In the name of keeping a balanced diet and such.) Luckily, the uncommonly kind server and  owner (2 separate people) at Mother’s decided that the chocolate cookie needed to go home with me (along with a few others, including an also uncommonly great piece of rugelach).

And I can’t thank them enough. Because it was goooood. In fact, it still is good – the majority of it is intact, waiting for me in my kitchen. I somehow refrained from obliterating the entire thing last night because I wanted to shoot it in daylight – a restraint made possible by the fact that I had the aforementioned, smaller decoy cookies to assuage my needs. I sliced off approximately 1/5 of it before I took its photo, so know that the cookie is actually bigger, even, than what you see in the shot. Also know that those chocolate chips are not, in fact, leaking from the cookie;  they are from my own stash. I placed them on the plate in order to provide a sense of scale.

In other words, it ain’t a small cookie.

And contrary to my initial assumptions, it is the exact opposite of dry and cakey. Instead, it is as deep and chocolaty as the best kind of brownie – stiff, yet a little bit moist – and strewn with chocolate chips. Oh, and if you can’t tell by the photo, the deep, moist, disc is crowned with a dollop of melted chocolate which has not only oozed and then solidified into the center of the cookie, but has created a stiff coating of chocolate that seems to act as a sealant, keeping everything even more moist and dark that it might’ve been without it. I suspect that this results in something that is better even on the second or third day than it is on the first.

No nuts.

*I made up this name because it doesn’t actually have one.  Just point to the chocolaty-est looking cookie in the case – but if  for whatever reason you don’t see it, get something else because so far I haven’t had tasted one from Mother’s that wasn’t delicious.