Last year, when I gave both Pink Door Cookies and HiFi Cookies a Best of Nashville award for Best Cookie, I thought I knew what each shop was capable of. They were equally amazing, though different in their own ways. This year, both shops found their stride. HiFi leaned into its ice cream sandwich offerings (more on that later), and Pink Door Cookies’ menu benefited from some fine flavor tuning and experimentation from pastry chef (and Chopped champion!) Mathew Rice. Rice uses an array of mix-ins, toppings and extracts to create flavor combinations that are at once nostalgic and innovative. Fried apple pie, blueberry pancake, peanut butter and grape jelly, cotton candy — the fact that Rice manages to encapsulate our memories of all those familiar flavors into a cookie is nothing short of magical. The only way you can truly understand that wizardry is to eat one. More good news: Pink Door now ships nationwide so you can show out-of-towners some of what they’re missing in Music City.
