Kylie's Pink Confetti Sugar Cookie

and America's Crumbl-ing third places

Hi babydolls,

In February I wrote a little amuse-bouche for Spike’s new issue, which is all about food.

It’s on Crumbl cookies and the strange American bliss of eating in your car. The word count was pretty spare and my editor at Spike wanted me to write about mukbang videos too, so I wasn’t able to get in everything I wanted to say about Crumbl.

So, here you’ll find both the piece from the magazine and a little preamble, which I’ve written just for you. It seemed like a good time to share with last week’s sugarpop-hysteria around the Kardashians’ cookie collection at Crumbl, particularly Kourtney’s flourless chocolate cake which apparently tastes terrible (I have my doubts as a flourless chocolate cake lover, this recipe from East London’s Violet Bakery is so good).

I became kind of obsessed with Crumbl during the Covid lockdown in 2020. I spent some time with my family in South Carolina and every once in a while we’d drive to a strip mall to get a box of the chain’s thick, soft cookies. Not because we really liked them but because it was something to do.

I’m still obsessed with Crumbl, even though I haven’t had one of their cookies in a long time. Mostly because of the social dimension. People love to make the point that actually the cookies aren’t very good, they’re too sweet, they don’t even seem fully baked. How they taste is totally beside the point. People like them because it’s something to do, which means it’s somewhere to drive.

I grew up eating in the car a lot. I’m the youngest of three and we’re all quite close in age, so the car was my safe space where I’d wait for my siblings at lessons and practices. I can still feel the warm leather seats and the light filtering in through the tint of the car windows. After school, sometimes we’d get ice cream or Chick-Fil-A.