8 minute read
Cooking Cravings
These New Hampshire cookie companies bake community and flavor into every bite
BY KARA MCGRATH / PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRITTANY GRIMES
The humble chocolate chip cookie is having a bit of a moment: According to one report by market research firm Data Intelo, the global chocolate chip cookie market is projected to reach over $30 billion by 2032. In New Hampshire, a handful of new cookie-focused bakeries aim to tap into that demand — and satisfy even funkier flavor cravings. Here are three places that will make your sweet tooth sing.
Mama Bear’s Cookies, Sullivan
Just about a mile and a half off Route 10 in Sullivan, you’ll find a little yellow cabin with crooked windows, an off-kilter roof, and the word COOKIES spelled out in giant white letters over the pink door. Inside, rather than a Hansel and Gretel-style trap, you’ll find piles of palm-sized stuffed cookies that the owner of Mama Bear’s Cookies, Bianca Alicea, calls “overindulgent.” In fact, she’s yet to meet someone who can finish a cookie in one sitting.
Although Alicea always stocks fan favorites like dark chocolate peanut butter and lemon blueberry, the cottage also has four new flavors on the menu every week.
“I’m part Italian and part Latina,” Alicea says. “(I throw in) those influences along with something that may be a familiar flavor profile.” For instance, her Italian side influenced her decision to make a pistachio and cherry cookie (stuffed with caramel for a modern twist). Her Latina side was responsible for the churro-inspired cookie that comes with a chocolate or caramel dipping sauce.
The name Mama Bear also comes from Alicea’s personal life. She got into the cookie-making business after selling her jewelry business in Rhode Island and moving to New Hampshire for a slower pace of life in 2019.
“I was exceptionally successful in Rhode Island. I am extremely grateful for that,” Alicea says. “I moved (to NH) and said, ‘OK, my life cannot just be 12-hour days of work.’ ”
With their now-adult son out of the house, Alicea and her husband decided to start fostering children. “It’s hard. The kids want to call you mama or mommy,” she says. “You want to set that boundary: They have a mom and are just with us for a little bit.” It was Alicea’s husband who came up with the phrase Mama Bear as an alternative title.
Now, fostering and the cookie cottage are Alicea’s full-time focuses, and a portion of each sale is donated to Feeding Tiny Tummies, a nonprofit that provides meals to children in need. She also donates physical product to the group, especially during the holidays. “Come Christmas time, we donated a hundred cookies in total,” Alicea says. “We wanted to make sure that the kids had cookies to give Santa.” https://mamabearscookies.shop/
Maddi Hatter Cookie Company, Bow
Before opening Maddi Hatter Cookie Company in 2022, Sarah Guinther spent 20 years as a microbiologist. Her science background has helped her develop cookie recipes that, on paper, might sound a little too funky. “I’m very, very precise,” Guinther says, noting that some of the 42 flavors she offers — like salted maple chocolate or cream cheese blueberry — just wouldn’t work. “If (the recipe) is off just a little bit, it’ll be funky.”
Guinther’s cookies are decadent, often finished with unexpected toppings and almost always involve a generous helping of frosting. She sells them out of her house in Bow where, with the help of a dual oven, she says she can make five dozen cookies in an hour. Guinther is a one-woman show, apart from her 8-year-old daughter, Madeline (the company’s namesake), who is just learning how to make chocolate chip cookies — Maddi Hatter’s most popular flavor.
Giving back to the community has been a core part of the Maddi Hatter’s business model since the start: Since Maddi Hatter is Guinther’s side gig, she donates all the proceeds from her cookie sales to the foster care system, prioritizing giving to “de-privatized companies, like Bridges.”
“There was once upon a time where I was so poor that I was eating a pizza a day, and I didn’t know if I was going to have a meal the next day,” she recalls. Now that she’s in a better situation, she hopes to help others. On top of donating all her proceeds, she’ll often offer cookies at a discounted price or completely gratis for children’s birthday parties. “Times are tough for everyone. A lot of people are losing jobs,” she says. “I’m more than happy to give back to these families, because I wouldn’t want my daughter to go without.”
While Guinther has dreams of expanding to an Alice in Wonderland-themed brick and mortar, currently you can buy Guinther’s cookies (including her “charcookerie boards,” which include a half or full dozen cookies and a hand-carved wooden board that can be customized for each order) from her website, to be picked up, shipped, or, in certain circumstances, hand-delivered by Guinther. “Whatever you, as the customer, prefer, that’s what I do.” maddihattercookiecompany.com
BenjeeS Cookies, Keene
When Ben and Sarah Brinson first launched BenjeeS Cookies in 2014, it was with a single cookie flavor: potato chip. “We found a recipe in a very old magazine for potato chip cookies (that) sounded really interesting,” Sarah — who is the PR arm of BenjeeS while Ben brings the baking expertise — says. “We spent two full years really working on that recipe and making it what we imagined it could be.”
The couple sold those potato chip cookies successfully for a year before Ben injured his elbow. “That injury took him out,” Sarah says. “He never recovered from that injury and received several diagnoses for chronic illnesses because of that injury.”
They put their cookie company dreams on hold but, according to Sarah, Ben never stopped talking about it. So, in 2023, Sarah left her job of 10 years and told him he had six months to get the company running again. When they relaunched later that year, things were different: “We went hard with it. Last year in August, we hit the ground with 18 flavors.”
Sarah and Ben call their product “smash cookies;” they’re thin and chewy with crunchy edges. “We pack as much flavor into that cookie as we can without using stuffing or frosting,” Sarah says. Though the potato chip cookie — a cookie made entirely out of potato chips, not one with some chips mixed in — remains their top seller, other flavors have become fan favorites. At the farmer’s markets, Sarah says the most popular flavors include M&M (“mostly because of the kids”), maple bacon molasses, double chocolate cherry, sweet curry and cardamom, and lemon basil.
Ben has been in the food business for decades, including training under a French baker in Nashua. Still, developing flavors is a joint endeavor, with Sarah often suggesting the initial idea based on something she’s seen online or flavors she’s craving. Ben then refines the idea into something unique to BenjeeS, often taking months to develop the perfect new flavor. Take their coconut macaron, for example. “I wanted a macaron so badly,” Sarah says. Instead of going the classic coconut-and-milk-chocolate route, Ben decided to add pineapple and white chocolate.
Currently, you can buy the cookies at two farmers markets (Peterborough and Jaffrey) and a stand on Main Street in Keene on Thursdays and Saturdays. “We’ll be out there until it gets cold, usually the first week in November.”
Customers can also order online for front porch pickup from their house in Keene or for two-day shipping across the country. The dream, Sarah says, is to open up a cookie cafe, specifically one that would be a safe space for all ages, as a nod to the cafes and restaurants where Sarah says, “I would buy a five-dollar French fry for a group of eight teenagers and they would let us sit there for three hours” after school.
The Brinsons hope this cookie cafe would be a place “where people can walk in and get all 18 flavors and all of the different milks and sit and really just kind of break into their lost childhood.” benjeescookiesnh.com
