Gideon’s Bakehouse Coffee Cake Cookie Copycat(?)
Gideon’s Bakehouse describes their limited edition coffee cake cookie as “an extra Buttery Vanilla Bean Cookie filled with Cinnamon Strudel and topped with our Homemade Double Baked Butter Crumbs!”
Divine right? Unfortunately, I don’t live anywhere near Gideon’s Bakehouse and they infamously don’t ship their goods. Tragic.
As far as I could find, no copycat recipe for this specific cookie exists although there are a couple for the chocolate chip version—which is very very good.
So obviously I’m going to try and copycat a cookie that I’ve never actually eaten. Yes, brilliant. This will be a very different endeavor from my copycat Levain Bakery cookie bake-off where I was following legitimate recipes specifically designed to copycat a particular cookie. My thought was to take recipes and retrofit them to suit my needs. FUN!
Let’s start with the butter crumbs because that’s the easiest I think. These crumbs look to be a streusel/crumb topping like you would find on crisps or crumbles. Twice bake implies…well, that they get baked twice so I assume the topping gets lightly baked prior to being pressed onto the cookie dough balls before the cookies go into the oven for the actual bake. More or less like the “crumbs” you find on/in Milk Bar cakes (yum, btw). For these “butter crumbs” I bookmarked a simple streusel recipe that I could use as a starting point.
Now for the cookie underneath. I scoped out the tags for Gideon’s Bakehouse on instagram to see if I could find better pictures of the cookie and I was not disappointed.
So there’s a pretty definitive cinnamon swirl throughout the cookie in the first photo but not so much in the others. Otherwise the cookie looks uniformly dense and a kind of thickish, hockey puck shaped. I also searched the #coffeecakecookie(s) tags because this cookie is an August 2020 limited edition but it has popped up a few other times previously. I found a few more photos, some with the cinnamon swirl not being nearly as clear, and felt like I had gleaned as much as I could.
Turning to the cookie research, Gideon’s describes the cookie as a vanilla bean base filled with a cinnamon “strudel” and by that I assume they meant “streusel.” In some previous instagram posts they’ve called it a cinnamon swirl and I think that’s the most accurate description of what’s happening inside the cookie given the pictures. The cinnamon swirl is pretty organic and sometimes not entirely distinct from the cookie dough so this definitely didn’t seem to be an instance of stuffing a cinnamon sugar filling inside a ball of dough so I started my Googling with what I thought was the most succinct description of what I was seeing—cinnamon roll cookies.
A lot of what I found were cookies that looked like cinnamon rolls which obviously wasn’t what I was after but they were at least giving me the components of my final product. This cinnamon roll cookie recipe from Cookies & Cups seemed really promising—she even calls for rolling up the sliced “rolls” into balls to bake.
(I just want to note that should this attempt at a copycat fail, it is no fault of these recipes I’m using—it’s not their fault I’m bastardizing their work to do this weird thing.) I felt like I had a very good direction to head in so I got started with the crumb coating first. I used the streusel portion of the recipe and added a splash of vanilla. I broke the crumbs up and tried to leave some bigger chunks since it looks more crumby and less chunky in Gideon’s photos. I baked the crumbs in a 300°F oven for about 20 minutes. The crumbs spread out a lot and kind of became a sheet so I let it chill out on the baking sheet in the fridge hoping that I’d be able to crumble it up once it was totally cool.
The cookie recipe was pretty straight forward, although rolling up the dough was a little difficult since I hadn’t floured my parchment well enough and the dough had warmed up. Gideon’s cookies are “almost half a pound” and I was able to find an old picture on their instagram of a cookie dough ball clocking in at 7 ounces so I sliced my cookie dough roll accordingly, ending up with 4 almost 7oz cookie dough balls. Yikes.
At this point the butter crumbs were totally cool and I broke them up into crumbs. I rolled the cookie dough balls in the butter crumbs, making sure to get the balls as densely covered on top as possible. The recipe calls for the cookies to freeze for 20 minutes and then bake at 350°F for 15-17 minutes. I wasn’t sure if that was going to be the sweet spot combo since my cookies were extra chonky. I checked out two copycat recipes for Gideon’s Bakehouse’s famous chocolate chip cookie—one also from Cookies & Cups and the other from OOLA—and they both baked at 400°F for ~9 minutes without freezing. I decided to freeze the dough balls for 20 minutes like the original recipe suggested but bake at the higher temperature like the other two recipes.
Once the oven was preheated, I removed a dough ball from the freezer and weighed it, just for funsies. That thing clocked in at 9 ounces. NINE. OUNCES. I hadn’t thought about the butter crumbs adding extra weight to the dough ball and worried that these cookies were a little too chonky. But there was not turning back at this point so I put it on a silpat lined quarter sheet pan and slid it into the oven, hoping for the best.
At first things seemed okay. When I checked it at 8 minutes it had spread some and there was still a big lump of dough in the middle but nothing terrible so I set a timer for another 4 minutes. By that time, the cookie had spread much farther and the edges had browned a lot but I could tell the middle wasn’t done. Undeterred, I let it bake for another few minutes before pulling it from the oven. It was misshapen and the crumbs had spread out but I didn’t think it was a TOTAL disaster. Honestly with some shaping from a rubber spatula it even looked pretty good?
So obviously this wasn’t right and even though I knew it was likely a dough issue and not a baking issue (again, this dough wasn’t meant to make big thick cookies!), I wanted to try a second cookie just to be sure. I decided to go to the Delish copycat Levain cookie method of freezing the dough balls for 90 minutes before baking at 375°F for longer. So while my initial gargantuan cookie cooled, I reset my oven temperature and waited. Once the dough had been chilling for a total of 90 minutes, I pulled out a ball (clocking in this time at just over 8 ounces) and placed it on a new baking sheet that was lighter in color than the one I used for the first cookie and this time lined with parchment paper. I also stole Delish’s tip of flipping a second baking sheet upside down on the oven rack to keep the cookie bottom from browning too much. I set a timer for 10 minutes, because I still had no idea what to expect, and waited. It looked promising at 10 minutes so I rotated it and set another 10 minute timer.
At this point, the cookie had spread a fair amount although it wasn’t as flat as the original cookie and the edges weren’t as dark which were both improvements in my book. It still wasn’t quite done so I baked it for another 3 minutes before pulling it since the edges were starting to brown too much. Like the first attempt, this cookie didn’t have the density of the butter crumbs that I was after but that’s kind of just a byproduct of the dough spreading so much during the bake. I did some more shaping on cookie #2 and it cleaned up really nicely.
While it cooled, I turned my attention to the original cookie, breaking off an edge to inspect the interior.
The cinnamon swirl isn’t as dramatically defined as the one in the first instagram photo but it pleases me nonetheless. Plus the taste was FANTASTIC. It was super soft and buttery with a healthy dose of cinnamon on the inside and the crumbly coating on the outside made for a tasty textural contrast. The interior of the second cookie was, shockingly, much the same, just with less browning on the edges and bottom.
I really do wish I’d been able to nail the visual component of the cookie, so that’s something that can haunt me for a while. I think next time—because sure—I’ll base the butter crumbs on the various “crumbs” used on Milk Bar treats. I really probably should’ve given them more than a passing glance in the beginning now that I sit here and think about it long after the fact. The Cookies & Cups cookie recipe I used was fantastic but obviously it wasn’t meant to do what I wanted it to do for this project so I would need to tweak it to ensure a chonkier cookie with minimal spread.
So despite the shortcomings at being a copycat of the Gideon’s Bakehouse coffee cake cookie—too big but also not chonky enough, too much spread, uneven crumb coverage…okay wow this list is long. LOOK. It’s a real good cookie okay? The “flaws” are only flaws in regards to the original cookie that I’ve never eaten or seen in person before. And frankly, I still think these bad boys would scratch the itch for a big ol’ coffee cake cookie if you’ve got it. The textures are perfect, the flavor is fantastic, and they’re a really fun baking project for an afternoon in quarantine.
I mean, maybe don’t make them 9 ounces? Or who cares, do what you want.
