My Best Cookie Experience Ever: Red Barn Bakery's Mediterranean Sunrise Breakfast Cookie

Last Saturday, I stopped by the Red Barn Bakery, a two-year-old eatery and store in Irvington specializing in baked goods made with organic ingredients. While there, I tasted its savory new Mediterranean Sunrise Breakfast Cookie. It was my best cookie experience ever.

Should this 11-ounce breakfast treat made with olive oil even be classified as a cookie? Aren’t cookies much smaller like Oreo’s or the creations made from a Duncan Hines or other brand supermarket-shelf mix. Doesn’t the word cookie evoke visions of Girl Scouts ringing your doorbell for a thin chocolate mint or a peanut-butter-sandwich cookie order?  

Red Barn Bakery founder Randell Dodge of Bedford is open to suggestions if someone can think of a better name for her bakery’s delicious breakfast treats.

More breakfast cookies are sold at Red Barn Bakery than any other baked goods. The choices are:

• The Large Breakfast Cookie (Sayulita Cookie), Red Barn's original breakfast cookie, inspired by a trip Dodge made to Mexico
• The Large Vegan/Gluten-Free Breakfast Cookie made with brown rice flour
• The new Mediterranean Sunrise Breakfast Cookie (comes in regular and gluten-free versions, priced at $6 each)

Topped with banana chips, the new Mediterranean Sunrise Breakfast Cookie is only a wee bit sweet because organic brown sugar is used in it sparingly. Its ingredients include whole wheat flour, oatmeal, raisins, coconut, sunflower seed, mango and papaya. It tastes slightly nuttier than the original (Sayulita) cookie although both cookies have almonds in their recipes. It is also available as a smaller, more conventionally sized cookie topped with pumpkin seeds; four of these smaller cookies, packed in a bag, cost $7.

The inspiration for creating the Mediterranean Sunrise cookie, Dodge said, was the growing popularity of the Mediterranean Diet combined with the bakery’s own olive-oil muffin becoming its best selling muffin during 2012.  

 “Think of the breakfast cookie as though it is a pie,” said Dodge. ”You may want to eat the whole thing in one sitting but that’s not necessary. Instead, eat a quarter of it and give your tummy a few minutes to start digesting its many nutrients. Soon you’ll feel full, energetic and happy.”

The cookies can be stored in their bags for up to three weeks, Dodge said.

The two older cookies can be ordered on the bakery’s website, www.redbarn-bakery.com, as five-packs. The new Mediterranean Sunrise cookie will also become available on the website later this month. Other locations besides the Red Barn Bakery where the bakery’s products can be purchased are listed on the website.

Additional baked goods will become website obtainable as the year goes by including regular and gluten-free brownies (called Triple-X because they are made with three different kinds of chocolate) and salt/carmel/apple crumb cake (especially suitable for sending to kids away at college).

Coming products for the holidays (ordering ahead is recommended):

Easter/Passover special products

1. Chocolate hazelnut torte
2. Double-chocolate, gluten-free, flourless chocolate cake
3. Carrot cake
4. French macaroons
5. Italian wheat berry pie (uses Dodge’s grandmother’s recipe)

St. Patrick’s Day special products

1. Irish soda bread (uses a recipe from a friend of Dodge’s great aunt in Ireland)
2. Cabbage tarts
3. Clover-shaped sugar cookies

Dodge is a resident of Bedford.

More about the Red Barn Bakery and Dodge is covered in RivertownsPatch, December 16, 2010. Many other Red Barn baked goods are described in RivertownsPatch, February 24, 2012.

Red Barn Bakery, 4 South Astor St., Irvington, NY, 914-231-7779, www.redbarn-bakery.com