I realize that most people don’t go to the City Bakery or their green Birdbath outlets for coconut cookies. They come in droves to load up on the legendary chocolate chip cookies, pretzel croissants or even the alien-looking baker’s muffin. The coconut cookie — an almost monotone golden brown that resembles a million other cookies on earth — just doesn’t inspire the same kind of fervor. But I think it should. If you’re familiar with the place, you could probably have guessed that Maury Rubin, the owner/chief baker of the chain — he who bakes caramel, almonds and fresh cranberries together in a way that you will never want to go without again — wasn’t going to put just any coconut cookie in his bakery case. Yet, to actually bite into one is still astonishing: how did they get all of that butter in there? Or in short: goodbye boring macaroons, forever!
As should be abundantly evident by now, I’m a bit obsessed with them, and finally decided in January that I was going to reverse engineer them or fail wildly trying. And oh, how wildly I failed, first auditioning a straightforward drop cookie with sweetened flaked coconut that was not even close. Then I decided to fiddle with all of my favorite baking vices: brown butter! sea salt! homemade vanilla extract! But I was still miles from the bakery case dream. And then, two weeks ago, I fell down the most wonderful internet rabbit hole, which began with these Blue Sky Bran Muffins, followed by a comment Patty which directed the curious to Maury Rubin demonstrating his Corn Muffins with Pear and Candied Ginger on Martha Stewart’s TV show, with an embedded video segment that I watched until the end, at which point my reward was revealed in the following 17 words: “After the break, I’ll be back with Maury to make a recipe for the perfect coconut cookie.”
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