There is, it turns out, such a thing as too much shortbread—more than what one comes away with from a folded napkin full of Lorna Doones or Pepperidge Farms or Simply Shortbreads. There is the Panera Bread Shortbread cookie, and not much else.
Be warned. The Panera Bread Shortbread cookie is fucking insane.
The first thing you need to understand about this cookie—while soaking in the chain’s so yuppie-tony-you-wanna-retch-in-someone-else’s-Gucci-bag decor as you contemplate ordering one—is that you won’t really need to order anything else, because you won’t have room for anything else. Get it? This sucker is a brick. Most cookies don’t have heft, but this one does. Seriously. Looks like it’s a shingle somebody broke off of the Gingerbread Man’s summer condo; you could brain your schnauzer with this thing, but if you then fed the cookie to the schnauzer as a sort of apology for the braining, it’d die. Flat line. Sugar coma. Dead dog dick.
Your disheveled face on a Humane Society Wanted Poster.
Why? Because this cookie is immense. See, in our hyperactive, on-the-go world, most cookie purveyors recognize the utility of making cookies easy to consume, small enough that one can just pop a few into the ‘ol gob, chew easily, and swallow. The Panera Bread Shortbread cookie makes. You. Stop. And. Strategize. Formulate a plan of attack, a studied approach. You can’t just be hungry; you’ve gotta have vision, to say nothing of ambition.
How are you going to eat it? Will you begin at one end of the rectangle and work your way to the others? Alternate from corner to corner? Painstakingly chomp it into a German cross shape? Can you even eat the entirety in one sitting?
Once you’ve navigated the series of choices and chess moves necessary to open your mouth, you must contend with the cookie itself, its flavor and volume and texture. The first few bites are heaven: brittle but not messy, delicious and satisfying without being excessively buttery, aesthetically stimulating.
Then, maybe one-third of the way through the cookie, it happens: you’re full, and the cookie’s shortcomings begin to reveal themselves. A little frosting might have been nice, right? And couldn’t they have baked it just maybe a minute longer? And why is this cookie so fucking big, and what made you think you could conquer it? And home you go hangdog, doggie-bagging it, to nibble the brick down to nothing over the next couple days.
And two weeks from now? You’ll go back, and you’ll order another one, and you’ll never learn.
Panera's Fucking Insane Shortbread Cookie
The shortbread brick that eats like a meal.
