‘Baked With Care. Please Handle With Care’
This is the injunction on the exterior box that brings to you a trove of Cate McCarthy's cookies. The interior box says “gourmet cookies... from the heart”. But it should – truthfully – say: ‘Abandon restraint all ye who enter here”. Because we promise you that just one bite of Ms McCarthy's raspberry streusel will make an awful fool of you. We know you like to think of yourself as disciplined and in charge – get ready to be prepared wrong. John McKenna, for instance, took to slicing the streusel into four finger-bite pieces. And then he would eat three of them. One after the other. Even before the tea was made. Has he no shame? No, he hasn't.
Ms McCarthy is a superb baker, and it's not just the streusels that testify to that – her Boston brownies and her cookies are sublime sweet things. But getting a box of these beauties through the post seems to us just about as fine a treat as you can give to someone.
That someone could be yourself, of course.
Prices from €24.99 for a box of cookies: www.thecookiejar.ie
