After A Few Unexpected Obstacles, Avondale to Finally Get a Cookie Store and Cafe

Back in January, pastry chef Angela Diaz was scheduled to soon open a permanent location of You’re A Cookie, her thriving online and wholesale cookie business, in a storefront in Avondale. Now, ten months later...she is still scheduled to soon open a permanent location of You’re A Cookie in Avondale — but in an entirely different location three quarters of a mile away.

Diaz plans to open in late October or early November, depending on when she can get the necessary permits. Regardless of the exact date, she will hold a pop-up Halloween weekend with candy-filled monster cookies and green chocolate dip. When the store does open, she’ll serve cookies, coffee, hot cocoa, ice cream sandwiches filled with soft serve ice cream, and take-and-bake cookie dough. The space will also house You’re A Cookie’s packaging and shipping operations.

The reason for the move, Diaz says, is because the original space would have required extensive and expensive renovations that wouldn’t have been finished until next summer. But after she got settled in her new quarters on California Avenue, she realized that the other space would have been too small, anyway.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she says. “We wouldn’t have been able to fit or scale the business up to the national level we want to go to.” Currently, You’re A Cookie cookies and dough are available at local markets, including Foxtrot, Local Foods, Harvest Time, and the Dill Pickle Co-op, but by next year, Diaz hopes to start selling on Amazon, which would broaden the company’s reach considerably.

You’re A Cookie

The You’re A Cookie retail store will sell cookies in its four base flavors — chocolate chip, blueberry oatmeal, double chocolate chip, and sprinkle crunch — made either with butter or all vegan; everything is gluten-free. Diaz is personally not vegan (“Butter is very big to me,” she says), but she wants to be respectful of food allergies so no kids who come to the shop will feel left out. Diaz herself has a gluten sensitivity, and began perfecting her cookie recipe while she was working as a pastry chef at Trencherman, because she wanted to offer her gluten-free customers something more substantial than sorbet.

At You’re A Cookie, Diaz wants her adult customers to be able to feel like a kid again. The soft-serve ice cream will taste like whole milk; eating ice cream sandwiches will be reminiscent of the experience of dunking a warm cookie into an ice-cold glass of milk. (There will be vegan ice cream, too, though Diaz hasn’t determined yet whether she’ll make it herself or bring it in from elsewhere.) The hot cocoa will be a cross between Swiss Miss with little marshmallows and the Mexican hot chocolate Diaz grew up drinking, and it will be sold in powder form in single-serving packets. Eventually, Diaz hopes to make and sell mini-cream pies and snack-packs of smaller, crunchier cookies, similar to Famous Amos.

To start, You’re A Cookie will be open for pickup every day, but there will only be counter service Friday, Saturday, and Sunday until Diaz has a chance to build up her staff. At the moment, she has only herself, one other person in the kitchen, and one part-time counter person. “I’m going to start small and then expand,” she says. “I don’t want to overpromise.”

Nothing went exactly according to plan, but Diaz is confident there will be a cookie store in Avondale. “It’s just down the street,” she says. “It’s a good move.”

You’re A Cookie, 3053 N. California Avenue, Scheduled to open late October or early November