Flour Bakery vs The Snack Aisle

In eating lunch at Flour Bakery's Fort Point location this weekend, we decided to break away from our usual cupcake-and-muffin baked-good order and try their take on two snacks known to grocery shoppers everywhere: the Pop Tart and Oreo cookie! Needless to say, both were infinitely tastier than their processed-food counterparts.

Flour's pop tart is a thick shell of puff pastry dough folded around a pile of thick, seedy, flavorful raspberry jam. The baked tart is then covered in a thin confectioner's sugar glaze with a barely-perceptible taste of lemon. It sounds so simple - and it is! - but I had never had a filled fruit pastry that was so successful in fruit, pastry, and overall taste. The flaky, buttery, vanilla-flavored pastry was a delight on its own or with the glaze, but the best bites included the robust jam. You won't find this kind of flavor in the breakfast aisle! I only wish that the jam had been spread more evenly throughout the tart.

Flour's oreo is a sandwich of two thick, dry, yet chewy cocoa-powder cookies and vanilla filling that tasted equally of buttercream and cream cheese frosting. As for the cookies, the traditional oreo taste was kicked up a notch due to more cocoa powder than the mass-produced inspiration, as well as a good amount of butter to hold it together. The slight chewiness was also appreciated. Why? (1) 'Tis a sign of freshness! (2) The buttery cocoa flavor could be more thoroughly enjoyed. (3) The moist filling would have slipped out upon biting two harder, cardboard-style cookies. The filling was a delight - while I initially thought it was the whipped buttercream frosting used in Flour's cupcakes, I detected a taste of cream cheese in later bites that served the filling well. Cream cheese would have thickened the frosting and therefore made it more stable for inclusion in a cookie, and it also added a slight tang to the overall flavor that blended marvelously with the bitter cocoa in the cookie. I'll definitely order some oreos again - if not for immediate eating in the bakery, then to go as a snack for later!