Meet Pinckney Cookie Cafe, the longtime Farmer’s Market cookie destination that now has its first brick and mortar location in Kirkland, Washington. Michael “Cookie Monster” Pinckney loves spreading joy through his delicious cookies, which includes his vegan and gluten-free Miracle Cookies. After more than a decade in business Michael is excited to welcome the community at the new cafe!
This interview is a must-read for anyone who believes building community one cookie at a time.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What is the story behind Pinckney Cookie Cafe?
I started the business in 2009, and it came about strictly because I’m a cookie monster. I had developed two cookies over literally decades, and people raved about them so much that I thought, hey, let me offer them to the world.
We started just online, and then we ended up in farmer’s markets, built a great farmer’s market business as well as an online business at lovethesecookies.com. We ship anywhere in the country and have some great gift items on the website, and we’re really excited about this next stage of our business, because going forward, we plan to grow through retail stores. Kirkland is our first retail store.
We opened up just a week ago, and really excited to get this off the ground.
You’ve been in business for fifteen years – what are you most proud of?
I’m most proud of surviving.
It has been quite the journey. But I think really the thing I’m most proud of is during COVID, we were mostly in Farmer’s Markets, and we stopped because they closed. And I was just feeling down, just was sad, and I’m not a sad kind of a person, and needed to do something to just feel better, you know, with the whole situation with COVID.
So I started giving $5 of every order of a dozen cookies or more to charities supporting COVID relief. And in that first year of COVID, we raised over $15,000.
Do you have a favorite cookie?
Oh, absolutely. And I don’t mind sharing that at all. In fact, I have a list of favorite cookies.
So, my favorite cookie is the Bing Bling. It’s a chocolate chip cookie with a chocolatey dough, coconut, and diced dried Bing cherries. And I just love dried Bing cherries. I have to avoid eating them all at the shop.
My second favorite cookie is the Brown Butter Brown Sugar Bourbon Spice. It has a whole bottle of Woodinville Whiskey Co. for a batch of a couple hundred cookies. It just has layers and layers and layers of flavor and just a wonderful texture and mouth feel. It just makes me happy.
My third favorite cookie is the Miracle Apple Pie because my favorite food is apple pie. And my fourth favorite cookie is our classic chocolate chip because it’s just the best classic chocolate chip ever.
Can you tell us about the cookie line you developed to ensure that customers who are vegan and gluten-free can enjoy your cookies?
I often say the best part of being in the cookie business is sharing cookies and putting smiles on peoples’ faces. That’s not really true. The best part of being in the cookie business is eating cookie dough when you’re making the cookies. But that aside, I used to demo at Whole Foods all the time, and people would walk by my little demo and say, are any of them gluten-free? And there’s only but so much of that that your heart can take.
And so literally, I came up with gluten-free cookies just because I wanted to put smiles on people’s faces – not have them feel bad when they walk by my stand. So I did a lot of experimenting over many months, came up with a 10-ingredient gluten-free flour mix, and made gluten-free cookies that were truly delicious. And then I had the same thing at the farmers markets where people would walk by, are any of them vegan? And there’s but so much of that your heart can take.
It wasn’t practical to have a traditional line, a gluten-free line and a vegan line. And I thought, OK, maybe I can come up with a great cookie that’s both vegan and gluten-free. And as it turned out, when I substituted for the butter and for the eggs, my gluten-free flour mix works better with the substitutes than it does with butter and eggs.
We call them Miracle Cookies because they’re vegan and gluten-free and delicious!
Why should people come check out the new Pinckney Cookie Cafe?
This cafe is all about local and showcasing local artisans.
So obviously the first local artisan is me and Pinkney Cookies but we have coffee from two local coffee roasters that I’ve gotten to know over the years.
Middle Fork Roasters and Boon Boona both make tremendous coffee but more importantly they’re just great people. I mean I love them both. We have tea from Shenzhen Tea – people who have been to the Farmer’s Markets will know Shenzhen. We have pie from Pie Bird. So my favorite food I’ve mentioned is apple pie and so we’re going to have pie and we’re going to have apple treats like apple crisp, apple cheesecake – you name it.
The cafe is a great place to come both because you can get great cookies and because you can also support all kinds of local businesses by shopping here.
How do you come up with new cookie ideas?
I’m always putting stuff in cookies! But here’s an interesting story – I don’t like raisins.
So no offense to everybody who loves raisins, but I don’t. But our oatmeal raisin cookie, I just love the cookie part. And the reason we have a miracle apple pie cookie is I was trying to think of other things to put in the cookie dough from the oatmeal raisin other than raisins and was experimenting and ended up with apples. The original oatmeal raisin recipe is literally where the predecessor to the miracle apple pie came from, which was due my not liking raisins and experimenting to put something else in the oatmeal raisin dough.
Just recently, we took the double chocolate espresso dough and we put white chocolate chips in it. We put dark chocolate chips in it. And so we’re always trying to see what ingredients go well with other ingredients.
And sometimes it results in a new cookie.
Why is it important for people to Spend Like It Matters?
Probably the most direct reason is that when communities spend within the communities, it helps for the vibrancy of that community. And also, when you spend locally, it helps build community.