Posted by admin on Nov 12, 2011 in Gluten Free and/or Flourless, Peanut Butter | 0 comments

Cravin Raven Organic Bakery (exclusively gluten-free bakery)
8339 SE 13th Avenue – Portland
$2.25

There are so many other cookies that take precedence over peanut butter that it is a rare day that one makes its way into my mouth.

At their best they taste like the inside of a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup (if properly sweetened and salted) and at worst they are too oily, not salty enough, and just…meh. As it turns out, most pb cookies I’ve tasted fall into the second category.

Today I took a field trip over to Sellwood (a neighborhood in SE Portland) with my friend Anya, who, unlike me, is very dedicated to a gluten-free diet. But very much like me, will happily drive across town for a cookie. So we did.

We picked out 4: chocolate chip, pumpkin chocolate chip, snickerdoodle and the peanut butter quinoa. For the reasons outlined above, I would not have even considered the peanut butter; Anya picked that one. But shit if it wasn’t the best of the bunch. I REALLY LIKED IT.

It was not greasy and  it was not flat (structurally or flavor-wise). It was even sort of on the cakey side, a quality I typically shun. But this was cake-like in a moist Bundt way, not cakey like day-old Entenmann’s crumb coffee cake. You know what I mean?

It’s a big meaty peanut butter cookie, soft to the tooth, hearty like a bowl of oatmeal (it’s like you’re eating actual, nourishing food – not just empty calories), and studded with good quality dark chocolate pieces.

This is better than most GF cookies* you’ll find – and better than almost any peanut butter cookie (GF or otherwise) I’ve ever tasted.

I should mention that the other cookies were also pretty nice. Anya actually dug the chocolate chip more than the pb. We agreed, however, that all four of them sort of tasted the same. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it just means that if you go to Cravin Raven, you may only need to bother buying one cookie – not four different ones.

* this does not include GF cookies that are inherently GF, such as coconut macaroons, Parisian macarons, almond horns, meringues, etc., which are made with neither wheat OR gluten free flours.