Food Fad? Or Old Favorite?

Been to any parties lately? It’s big-time graduation season right now. Weddings abound, Father’s Day is coming up…

Have you seen one of these on a party buffet?

Image from Touché Touchet social media

When I spotted this post from HoCoLocal bakery Touché Touchet this morning I must admit I was a bit startled. Do people still eat cookie cakes? Are they even “a thing?”

Aren’t all the cool kids choosing from assorted mini Bundt cakes at this season’s parties? Or perhaps oohing and ahhing over customized cookies from a cottage bakery, glossy with icing like a satin evening gown?

Until I saw this photo I hadn’t thought about cookie cakes in quite some time. I remember buying one for a family birthday a good while back. At the time the only place I knew that made them was at the Mall in Columbia. You know the one - - near the foood court.

Image from a Google search

In my mind, cookie cakes were one of those food trends that become very popular so as to almost be ubiquitous and then gradually fade away. These days that happens far more quickly than it used to. (One wonders how long we will be seeing Nashville Hot Chicken restaurants popping up before their heyday is yesterday’s news.)

As long as we are engaging in a bit of time travel, I might as well take you to the first place I ever saw a cookie cake.

Chanticleer, from a postcard

This is Chanticleer, a little restaurant in South Hadley, Massachusetts where one could get breakfast and lunch. They also had a booming business making and selling personalized cookie cakes to the nearby college, where I was a first-year student in 1979. They were affordable enough that you could chip in with friends and get one for a special event.

They were certainly new and trendy to me.

The little restaurant is no longer there. The college, as the song says, “forever shall be” - - or at least I hope it will. I don’t know if cookie cakes are even heard of on college campuses anymore.

Back in the day South Hadley was no larger than a pocket handkerchief and boasted two restaurants, a bookstore, and a bank. If you didn’t have a car, and most of us didn’t, you were limited in your off-campus choices (if you didn’t want to lug whatever you purchased on the Five College Bus run to nearby Amherst, UMass, Hampshire or Smith.)

All of this is to say that those cookie cakes from Chanticleer were a really big deal back then. I wonder what the equivalent food item would be today?

If you have never stopped being a fan, it’s good to know some local folks are still making them.

Do you have any local food memories of fads/crazes/trends? I’d love to hear them.

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