We love cookie

Everyone loves cookies, but beneath this universal fact lay dozens of feuding factions. Chewy! Crispy! Chocolate chip! Oatmeal raisin! Thick! Thin! The rivalries abound, but fortunately, so do our town’s cookie choices. Here’re a dozen guaranteed to satisfy all sides of the Cookie Camp. Now, if only we could agree on what to dunk them in…

Albemarle Baking Company’s Black Cadillac (1) pacifies even the fiercest chocolate craving. Blue Ridge Country Store’s Chocolate Chunk (2) is a crispy, buttery, sweet ending to your salad bar lunch. Breadworks’ Brown Sugar Shortbread with Pecans (3) tastes like a homemade Pecan Sandie. Calvino Café’s Chocolate Chunk (4) delights gourmets with toasted walnuts, bittersweet chocolate and a discernible pinch of sea salt. Cappellino’s Crazy Cakes’ Snickerdoodle (5) is fluffy, cinnamon-sugary perfection. Chandler’s Bakery’s Sugar cookies (6) are a tasty classic, yet fully customizable down to their shape and colored sugar topping. Feast!’s Molasses Sugar (7) looks like chocolate from the darkness of the molasses, but spices things up with ginger and clove. Foods of All Nations’ German Chocolate (8) packs all the moist, fudgy flavor and flaky coconut that we love about the cake into a cookie. HotCakes’ Oatmeal Raisin (9) outshines the traditional recipe with its plump golden raisins and healthy shake of cinnamon. Market Street Market’s Chocolate Chip (10) perfects the dough-to-chip ratio and that elusive “crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside” quality. Penne Lane’s Black & White (11) comforts homesick New Yorkers with this puffy, cake-like cookie slathered with chocolate and vanilla icing. Simeon Market’s Peanut Butter (12) is crispy and decorated with a criss-cross just like Mom’s.—Megan Headley

Dough yummy

We have Ben and Jerry to thank for the delightful mix of ice cream and raw cookie dough. Here are four local takes on a now-classic treat. Go ahead and indulge. You know you want to.

Twenty-year-old Chaps makes its cookie dough with creamy vanilla bean-flecked ice cream, chunky chocolate chips and huge spoonfuls of housemade cookie dough blended through. Sinfully good.

Locally owned Dips & Sips is the place for your cookie dough cravings. Good in a waffle cone or sundae, try the Baja Chocolate: a gorgeous mixing of chocolate ice cream with a marshmallow ribbon, thick chunks of cookie dough and nubs of chocolate. Order a double scoop during $1 Off a Scoop Tuesdays!

At Ben & Jerry’s, you could have a humongous scoop of classic cookie dough, but consider switching it up with Half Baked, a divine mixture of vanilla and chocolate frozen yogurts with huge gobs of fudgey brownies and chocolate chip cookie dough.

For the truly adventurous, try the Fried Cookie Dough Sundae at West Main. Enormous dollops of cookie dough are deep fried until crisp, then topped with creamy vanilla ice cream and drizzled with chocolate sauce. Yummy to the 10th power!—Jenée Libby

Pure gulp

A great cookie demands great milk. and Charlottesvillians are fortunate to live in first-rate dairy country. Homestead Creamery in Wirtz, Virginia, packs grass-fed milk from Valley farms in classic milkman-type bottles. It’s nonhomogenized (or “creamline”) milk, meaning the cream floats on top. As long as you’re already indulging, give that heavy bottle a satisfying shake and sit down to a glass of the richest milk around. A half-gallon at the Emmet Street Kroger will set you back $2.99.

Cut it out

Baking cookies at home?
Try this cute pup-shaped cutter from The Happy Cook.