Yesterday, with lines reaching three hours at times, Gideon’s Bakeshop opened in Disney Springs. This popular local bakery from the East End Market in Orlando always draws a crowd for its monster cookies. These cookies with over-the-top amounts of chocolate chips and other mix-ins coating the cookies have an absolute wow factor. But when it comes to cookies, looking good is one thing–but more important is taste. Here’s what you can expect.
Currently the Disney Springs location has seven all-day flavors and one morning-exclusive Coffee Cake Cookie flavor.
A couple notes about these cookies: they’re big, thick, and rich, weighing in at nearly a half pound each, and the texture is extremely dense — in some cases, almost like fudge. This makes it possible to cut slices of cookie to share.
We picked six to give a taste test, and here’s our rankings:
#1: Pistachio Toffee: A perfect combination of sweet and salty, this was the perfect flavor combination.
#2: Original Chocolate Chip: If you’ve eaten at Polite Pig, you may have noticed these as one of their dessert offerings before the opening of Gideon’s. It may be possible to add more chocolate chips to a cookie, but we’re not really sure how. A solid choice if you’re only going to try one.
#3: Peanut Butter Crunch: So. Much. Peanut. Butter. It’s a good cookie, but you really have to like peanut butter to dive into this one.
#4: Triple Chocolate: Like the peanut butter cookie, this is one for extreme chocoholics. It is unlikely anyone would want to even try to eat this one alone, but if you’re looking for a cookie that eats more like a slab of fudge, you’ll want to try this one.
#5: Santa’s White Christmas: This one has an unusual blend of flavors — coconut, caramel, nuts, white chocolate, and even ground-up coffee beans. There’s no doubt that this cookie will have a dedicated following around the holidays, but it just seemed like there was too much going on. Good, but not a top choice.
#6: Cookies & Cream: This is the only one that we probably wouldn’t buy again. It seemed like there was just too much “cookie within a cookie” feeling about it, making it difficult to feel enthusiastic with all the flavors mushing together. Visually, it was also the least appealing.
But here’s the real surprise on the menu — yes, go to Gideon’s for the cookies, but if you’re a fan of coffee, the Peanut Butter Iced Coffee (a nitro cold brew on tap) was exceptionally good. Something to note, their iced coffees are made with oat milk, but taste-wise, we couldn’t tell the difference between the oat milk and regular milk. We can’t wait to go back and try the other coffees on the menu.
Prices are surprisingly reasonable — cookies are $6 each (a bargain given that you can easily split these among several people) and the nitro cold brew coffee is $5.
We’ve got more to review, but we need to let these cookies settle for a while!
Do any of these flavors sound tempting to you? Which ones would you like to try?
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