Put This Cookie Right In Your Face
Put This Cookie Right In Your Face
On Pink Door Cookies and Bad Moves' “Party with the Kids Who Wanna Party with You”
It’s Pride Month so I’m featuring LGBTQ-owned snack and candy companies throughout June. Buy their products! Support them on social media! They’re doing really delicious things.
The Snack
Pink Door Cookies
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Don’t let the name fool you, the enchanting treasures that come out of the Pink Door Cookie kitchen are so much more than cookies.
Made in Nashville by pastry chef Mathew Rice, Pink Door Cookies are edible pieces of art, brightly colored candy-covered flavor-packed gems that slam your tastebuds with comforting flavors from childhood while simultaneously redefining what a “cookie” can be.
In fact, in my first draft of this newsletter, I spent several minutes experimenting with new words and phrases that might better suit Rice’s creations, but the best I could come up with — before the coffee kicked in, anyway — was a “snookie,” a snack plus a cookie.
As anyone who watched MTV in the 2010s knows, that title is already taken.
I never watched Jersey Shore but I was fascinated with how the show’s stars impacted pop culture. Even today, their very aggressive, very tan legacy remains.
I, for one, will never shake the fact that Snooki — gif’d above — referred to the loose skin around an unbent elbow as the “wenis.” It rhymes with penis and the not-a-word even made it into her debut novel A Shore Thing.
Imagine having that kind of power!
Back to cookies.
Like Snooki, Rice does whatever the hell he wants, leaning on his professional pastry chef expertise to pack in the flavor with unexpected ingredients, hidden extracts, and surprising flavor combinations.
Last year, for a limited time, he baked the Salty Chocolate French Fry cookie, a malted milk chocolate cookie covered with potato sticks and salt. It was a cookie for anyone who loves to dip their french fries in chocolate milkshakes. (Me. Probably you, too.)
His Blueberry Pancake cookie, a menu mainstay, tastes exactly like a blueberry pancake feast. I don’t know how he does it. The flavor of pancakes, butter, maple syrup, and blueberries hit you all at once, like the perfect bite of Sunday morning. It is not a cookie! It’s a plate of pancakes that just so happens to look like an unassuming cookie! WHAT KIND OF WILLY WONKA WIZARDRY IS THIS!?
Rice has filled his cookies with crunchy chow mein noodles, buttered popcorn, and corn cereal; he’s topped them with glazes and frostings made with strawberry milk, melted ice cream, and crushed cherry blossoms.
Just when you think you have a hold on what Rice is capable of, he takes it a step further.
Have a look at one of his latest creations, the Cocoa Banana. It’s a lightly flavored banana cookie topped with icing made of melted Fudgsicles. Great, right?
So how does he top such a decadent, summery treat?
Take a look:
Look closer!
Do you see what’s happening here? Those are chocolate-covered Cocoa Puffs.
Very chocolatey Cocoa Puffs weren’t chocolatey enough so Rice ROLLED THEM IN MORE CHOCOLATE.
As someone who once melted down a bunch of strawberry Laffy Taffy and whipped it into buttercream for cupcakes, I have nothing but respect for my over-the-top candy-loving cookie king.
The Pink Door Cookies cookie window is open daily at 321 Hart Street in Nashville or you can pick up cookies on Saturdays and Sundays at the Nashville Farmer’s Market. You can also order cookies online for nationwide shipping via FedEx.
Rice is donating a portion of Pink Door’s June sales to the Just Us program at the Oasis Center, which provides support and resources for LGBTQ youth in Middle Tennessee. Learn more here.
The Song
“Party with the Kids Who Wanna Party with You” by Bad Moves
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Bad Moves are a power pop band from Washington D.C. and their entire discography looks like a platter of Pink Door Cookies.
I mean, look how pretty they all are together:
I would definitely eat that.
Like Pink Door Cookies, every Bad Moves song shines brightly with different flavors. Listening to their 2020 release Untenable — which is all I’ve listened to for the past week, tbh — I hear crunchy post-punk acts like Milemarker and Street Eaters and more melodic and buoyant pop bands like Mates of State.
Have I named enough great bands yet for you to give Bad Moves a listen yet? What if I told you there are a few Q and Not U-inspired “Angry yelling in the middle of a happy dance party” moments?
Sold!
My current favorite track is “Party With the Kids Who Want to Party With You,” a song — embedded above — that urges us to stop trying to win the rat race and instead focus on the people in our lives who genuinely make us happy.
Fuck fighting for Instagram likes, y’all, go party with your friends!
Another great Bad Moves jam is “Working For Free,” a pulsating anti-capitalism punk tune that makes good use of the word “Dickensian.” That’s a rare and impressive feat!
Maybe on their next record they’ll find a way to work in “wenis”? Stranger things have happened.
Buy Untenable via Bandcamp here.
In Nashville? Bad Moves are playing an all-ages show at Drkmttr Wednesday, July 20 with Cheekface. Info and tickets here!