Firehook Bakery

Posted by Edmund in Bakeries & Sweets, Washington, DC | 0 comments

Aug 02, 10

Cuisine: American Baked Goods.
Specialties: Brownies, Cookies, Bread.
Location: All throughout DC and Virginia. My store is at 1909 Q. Street, NW, Washington DC 20009.
Price: $1.45 for cookies, $2.50 for brownies.
Best Value in Town, Best Brownie in Town.

I see very few traditional bakeries these days, especially in the DC area. At one point in time, a bakery was the place to go for a wide variety of treats. Forget seating, forget fancy ambience, forget savory foods, and definitely forget specialty shops. A baker wasn’t a specialist, nor a restaurateur, but rather a person who made a little bit of everything and expected people to pick up treats to go. Now, the trend is increasingly towards either larger cafés or one-treat specialty shops, like cupcakeries.

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In that context, Firehook Bakery really is a relic of the past, returning to the tradition of the artisan baker. While Firehook is a large chain with over 10 locations, in almost all other aspects this is about as traditional as it gets. There isn’t much of a seating area, though the treats can be eaten inside. Everything is simple and wooden, and no fancy designs span the walls. Instead, Firehook allows the treats to do the talking, leaving everything out in a large display case in the front. It’s not the place to relax or enjoy the scenery. Rather, you come here for one thing alone: the amazing treats.

Once you enter the shop, though, it may not be all that easy to actually select what to have, as Firehook boasts one of the largest selections of baked goods in DC. It has virtually everything a typical American bakery would have. It mostly focuses, however, on brownies, cookies, and the bread. It is, in fact, one of the few places left in DC where you can get a decent loaf of bread, and the cookie selection is easily the largest I’ve seen in not just the District, but in any bakery at which I’ve eaten. Not only do the cookies include everything from gingerbread to coffee to chocolate, but Firehook will tend to make some truly unique creations, tossing just about everything into one cookie for a truly overloaded experience. Just take a look at the Sweet Dreams Cookie to see what I mean—ginger, cinnamon, walnuts, sugar, and chocolate chips are all thrown together.

The most notable aspect of Firehook, however, is the price. There’s a tendency for bakeries these days to downsize portions and charge higher and higher prices, but at Firehook, you can find a relatively cheap cookie ($1.50-ish) or brownie ($2.50-ish) that’s about twice the size of what you would get anywhere else, if not more. Trust me, everything’s supersized and heavy so that even one of these cookies or brownies is a meal in itself. Firehook is easily the best value in town for baked goods.

For that price, you’d think the quality wouldn’t be quite that great, but surprisingly, Firehook delivers even there. I particularly recommend the brownies, probably my favorite in the District. They are very simple, without many extra ingredients or toppings added in, but the balance between sweetness and chocolate is nearly perfect, so that the brownies are never cloying in either flavor. The texture is fantastic, too—they are so cakey that they seem light in comparison to most brownies, yet they are so moist that they just melt in your mouth.

The cookies aren’t quite as nice but are great nonetheless, especially if you like your cookies on the hard side with a very big snap. Sometimes the flavors are a bit meek, and the more overloaded cookies tend to be a bit too much of a confused jumble, but for $1.50 a piece, those are really just minor flaws.

Overall, then, Firehook may not be the best bakery in town, but it is the place to go if you need traditional American goods at true American prices. You just can’t go wrong here.

What I had

1. Chocolate Fudge Brownie: This is about as simple as a brownie gets. It is, however, excellently made in practically every way. First, it’s on the cakey side, but not overly so. Instead it has a nice moistness to it and even seems to have a bit of fudgy-ness that makes it a bit smoother/more gooey. The moistness especially stands out because this brownie is extremely thick. Nor does that thickness make it very heavy at all. The best part, though, is by far the crust, which is just a thin, glaze-like layer that has a much more intense chocolate and sugary taste to it, and it has one of the most satisfying crunches that you could ask for in a brownie. In fact, it just crackles as you bite into it. Overall, then, the brownie gives you a mouthful of the cakey, chewy, and crispy, making for a delicious consistency. And the flavor is right on, too. It’s on the rather dark side, so it has a very pronounced cocoa taste, but it doesn’t overwhelm you because the lightness of the cake and the added sugar in the crust act to balance out the cocoa. 4.3+/5.0. Very big, both in flavor and size.
2. Sweet Dreams Cookie (Chocolate chip with ginger, cinnamon, walnuts, and sugar glaze): Honestly, this cookie sounds delicious (and it is to an extent), but in reality it’s just a jumble of flavors—a few too many if you ask me. To be fair, I do like how complex it is. You get the intense, crunchy chocolate chip, the spicy, sweet gingerbread-like taste of cinnamon, the neutral crunch of the walnuts, and a bit of a spicy kick from the herby ginger. At the end of the day, though, a lot of the flavors really don’t come out well and even seem extraneous, especially the walnuts and the ginger (which seems tacked on for kicks). The cookie itself, though, is very finely made. It has a fantastic consistency—perfectly crunchy and crispy at the edges, chewy and soft on the inside. That’s especially surprising because the cookie is so huge (and I mean huge), meaning that it must have been baked very well if it has such a great consistency throughout. That excellence in baking is all the more apparent because the cookies stay moist for very long spans of time (I typically get them later on in the day). 3.8/5.0. A great value, but I’d like just a bit more flavor.
3. Chocolate Chip Cookie: This cookie is very thin and wide, giving it a nice, even consistency and a very good chocolate chip-to-dough ratio. This cookie is, in fact, just loaded with chocolate chips. The chips themselves are distributed throughout the cookie and come semi-melted, with just the right level of creaminess and chew to them to make them superb. The chips are on the dark side, with a strong bittersweetness to them. The cookie itself, though, isn’t much to speak of. It has a great crumble—very crunchy on the corners, but increasingly soft as you get to the center, meaning it has a lot of nice contrast in the texture. Still, I found the dough to be a bit gritty and for some reason tough in the chew. Also, it has a very strong taste of its own, like a combination of a sugar cookie and a tough pound cake or cornbread. It’s oddly satisfying initially yet becomes offsetting by its intensity. It may sound delicious to some, but I find it to be a bit of a flavor clash with what I think of as a chocolate chip cookie. Still, the overall combo is not a bad cookie by any means. 3.1/5.0
4. Carrot Cake: As soon as I cut into this cake I knew there was something wrong with it. It’s so frosty, in fact, that both the frosting and the cake give resistance as you cut through them. And even worse, the cake keeps on falling apart pretty much in every single layer. So it’s definitely not a masterful cake. Still, the flavors are very nice. The cream actually tastes like cream cheese and even has the same, thick consistency to it, though it can get a bit sweet and has a bit of blandness to it, like a whipped cream. The cake itself is moist and chock full of raisins and nuts, giving it a very crunchy burst, which I think it really needs, since the flavors here aren’t very pronounced or bold. That, I suppose, would be my biggest criticism. While this is a good carrot cake, nothing stands out about it as anything special, and really the cake is a bit bland, which is why all those chunks help it out so much. The frosting is a bit on the very light side too, reminiscent of whipped cream. 2.5/5.0
5. Chocolate Espresso Cookie: The one cookie that really stands out, largely because it’s filled and oozing with a thick layer of fudge, giving it a very intense chocolate flavor that I find to be enjoyable. That same fudge helps to give the cookie a very interesting texture, too, as its extremely gooey on the inside, while very crunchy on the outside. It even has nuts added in to give it an extra crunch. My main problem is that the espresso doesn’t come through at all, so this cookie really doesn’t do justice to its flavor. Also, it’s very sweet for something so intensely chocolaty, and so it can get cloying very fast, with two big flavors that really just collide after a while. Still, it definitely gets points for the great flavor. 3.7/5.0

What I’ve had before

1. Macaroon with chocolate: Fantastic for something just filled with coconut. I’m not a fan of coconut, but this macaroon does it right by literally overloading the cookie with coconut so that coconut is just bursting and overflowing in your mouth. The dark chocolate really helps to balance out the sweetness of the coconut a bit, in addition to giving a nice gooeyness to the mix. I’m still not a fan of American macaroons, though.
2. I’ve also had the Macadamia Nut White Chocolate, Gingerbread, and Pecan Chocolate Cookies, which were all pretty good, but a bit weak on the flavor.

Scores

Ambience: N/A. This is not a place to hang around.
Taste: 3.5/5.0.
Value: 4.8/5.0.
Verdict: 4.0/5.0. Fantastic for the cheap prices, though you probably won’t be blown away.