LA Cookie Challenge: Huckleberry vs. Gjelina

We are absolutely about our crazy new pup. Bella, or Little Bear, as we affectionately refer to her, is also pretty crazy about us, so much so that she has a crazy barking fit whenever we leave the house. We've given her plenty of practice spending time alone in her "den" while we are home, but she still loses her cool getting us some noise complaints from our neighbors. As we work on her issues, we've been looking for fun date ideas where we can bring the girls with us. Enter this blog post from Cupcakes and Cashmere on the Best Chocolate Chip Cookies in LA. We've decided to hit up these bakeries (plus a few more) with the puppies in tow, two at time, for head-to-head match-ups in a cookie bracket challenge showdown, divided into the West side and the East side (with I-405 being the dividing line). Since Dustin and I look for different things in cookies, we are going to do our own separate brackets because arguing over which cookie is best could be a marriage deal-breaker!

First up were a couple of local-ish joints, Huckleberry and Gjelina. You probably couldn't have picked two different cookies to start out the competition!

Huckleberry is a great little bakery and breakfast spot in Santa Monica— the perfect stop to grab some snacks on your way to the beach. The cookie was pretty substantial in size and was soft and thick in the middle with ever-so-slightly crispy edges. Huckleberry also used a dark chocolate that gave it a slightly elevated feel to a classic chocolate chip cookie. Each bite had a good ratio of chocolate to the rest of the cookie.

Gjelina is a fabulous brunch spot on the happening street Abbott Kinney, out in Venice. Unlike Huckleberry, Gjelina took a more untraditional take on the chocolate chip cookie by incorporating oats into the batter; however it was far from being an oatmeal cookie. The cookies texture was fairly uniform and crunchy all the way through with a few large pockets of chocolate throughout.

The Verdict

It probably isn't hard to guess if you know our tastes, but Dustin voted for Gjelina, and I voted for Huckleberry. It's clear we have different tastes when it comes to the perfect chocolate chip cookie!