Isabella's Vegan Cookies!

I love to bake. But baking can be dangerous for me. You see, I'm not one of those people who can bake a batch of cookies and wait until they cool to sample a bite of a cookie and then give the rest away. Nope. I lick the bowl. I sample a cookie straight from the oven, another 15 minutes later, and probably another after they cool. I do always give some away but not before hoarding back a few. I call that quality control.

I do much better with packaged, homemade cookies from small-batch bakeries. And I like it when the calories are on the bag. And I like it when the calories are reasonable. Oh, and it helps when those cookies are delectable and possibly better than homemade. And that's the case with Isabella's Cookie Company cookies!

Isabella's, which is based in Redondo Beach, California, sent me some samples of their new vegan flavors. Isabella's isn't just a vegan bakery though. They offer pretty extensive line of non-vegan cookies too in flavors like green mint chip, apple fritter, and fluffer nutter. But they do have seven vegan flavors. I love it when non-vegan companies cater to vegans too!

The new vegan flavors are V-Ging (vegan ginger molasses cookie with vanilla drizzle) and V-RV (vegan red velvet cookie with sweet vanilla drizzle).

First I sampled the V-RV.

Imagine a slice of soft, moist red velvet cake baked into a cookie. That's what this was. These were very soft and very cakey. And the vanilla drizzle was the perfect complement to the fluffy cookie. I could have eaten the whole bag! Damn, maybe cookies from bakeries are dangerous for me too. Luckily, these are only 110 calories per cookie. Not bad.

Anyway, I like to live on the edge (okay, not really). I only dig danger when we're talkin' "eating too many cookies dangerous." Yes, I'm quite the rebel. So rebellious that I waited until the next day to break into the V-Ging cookies.

These were amazing! I love a chewy cookie more than just about anything. And these were perfectly chewy. And I'm not sure why, but these reminded me of the way doughnuts taste. And we all know how I feel about doughnuts. A co-worker commented that they were a little too sweet, but I didn't think so. Then again, I've been known to say, "There's no such thing as too rich." And no, we're not talking about money.

I'd love to try Isabella's other vegan flavors. There's a chocolate chip cookie (V-Chip), peanut butter (V-Nutter), oatmeal (V-Oat), chocolate chocolate chip (V-Coco), and a low-sugar chocolate chip cookie (Lil' Sweet Bella).

You can order the cookies on Isabella's website. They're $4.25 for a bag of five mini-bite cookies or $7.50 for a bag of 10 bite-sized cookies (that's the size I have here, about the same as any regular cookie).