Hello, Know Direction readers, and welcome to Alex Analyzes! My last Alex Analyzes article on Hero Forge Color was super popular, and I’d really like to use my platform here on Know Direction to try and give some extra spotlight to other creatives that you might not have heard about before. Call it comradery since I run a Third-Party Publishing company and know what it’s like to be doing cool things that no one sees. And if there’s one thing that I believe that you REALLY want to see, it’s today’s review!
Today, Alex is Analyzing Critical Hit Cookies!
What is Critical Hit Cookies?
So you might not have heard of Critical Hit Cookies before. CHC is a bakery of sorts, run by Karee Vogrin. Karee bakes all of her confections in her own kitchen using her own ingredients, which range from cookies to brownies to blondes. Critical Hit Cookies is known for being a cookie delivery service; Karee packs the cookies by hand and mails them to your door! According to their site, Karee opened Critical Hit Cookies because she was a fan of Tabletop RPGs and started listening to the Order of the Amber Die podcast episodes. She would bake them cookies for their marathon games, and the members of the Order told her that her cookies were so good that she had to open a business and bake cookies for people professionally!
You can check out Critical Hit Cookies’ website here!
They also have a Twitter handle!
Ordering the Cookies
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- Critical Hit Cookies features a very clean website design. It lacks a lot of the bells and whistles of a typical bakery website, but it lists products effectively enough. The site is divided into numerous tabs that display information; if you’re ordering cookies from Critical Hit Cookies, you’ll probably want either the Shop or the Collections tab. Also, I highly recommend making an account on the website; it makes checking out a LOT faster because it saves stuff like your address and your order history.
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- The shop section lists all of Critical Hit Cookies’ current products. New products are added frequently, and in addition to having very traditional names, Critical Hit Cookies is starting to add some “nerdier takes” too, such as the Benevolence Bars which are a reference to Jason Bulmahn’s catch phrase from Oblivion Oath: “So Benevolent!”
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- If the shops section is every cookie placed in front of you like a bakery, the collections section is Critical Hit Cookies’ way of searching for product by general type. You’ve got blondes and brownies, cookies, and even some categories based on taste or aesthetic, like “fall cookies.”
Price Point
As you can see from the images, a dozen Critical Hit Cookies runs you $15.00 USD plus shipping fees. Since you’re looking at about 12 cookies per order, that means each cookie is priced at just a little bit over $1 per cookie. In my experience, that is fairly reasonable, especially since these aren’t like Keebler Elf cookies; these are high-quality, sophisticated Mordant Spire cookies!
Alex’s Experiences
Alex has a sweet tooth? No way, never would have guessed it. I mean, just because he makes a PaizoCon tradition out of eating a monstrous-sized sundae and has been on record as saying, “The best part about PaizoCon is PaizoCon. The second best part about PaizoCon is all the free cookies this hotel gives us,” doesn’t mean he has a sweet tooth. NO. WAY.
I’m afraid that I don’t have many pictures for this next section, dear readers, for a very embarrassing reason. I confess to you all that I have a MONSTROUS sweet tooth, and in my excitement to eat these cookies I forgot to take pictures. Oops!
The cookies arrived at my doorstep about 3 or 4 days after I had placed my order. Karee sent out a thank you message almost immediately, and her site has built-in shipping updates so you know exactly when your cookies will be arriving. I consider myself pretty fortunate; Karee is a fellow Pennsylvanian, so shipping from her to me didn’t take very long at all. If you’re out of state, consider the the distance between you and PA as well as the fact that the USPS is currently having its capacity gutted in an attempt to steal the elec NO POLITICS ONLY COOKIES!
For my first order, I decided to try Karee’s Chocolate Chip Crunch Blondes. Believe it or not, but despite my colossal sweet tooth I had never had a blonde before, so I was eager to try something new. My order arrived in a standard USPS Priority Mail Tracking, and it was stuffed in a way that would have made Crystal Malarsky proud. No, the box didn’t explode glitter all over me and my home, but it was filled with special home-made packing paper that was cut in fun zig-zags from a pale yellow paper. Critical Hit Cookies’ logo features a dragon holding a massive cookie, so I think that this paper was designed to look like gold, giving the impression that I was opening a dragon’s horde of cookies. Very nice presentation there.
In addition to the paper gold, the sugary gold was also inside! I’m not really sure what I was expecting to receive in the mail; maybe a stacked tray of cookies on a plate wrapped in plastic wrap or something? Critical Hit Cookies is FAR more professional than my meager idea of how a cookie should be shipped, however. Each cookie was custom- wrapped and sealed for freshness inside of a cute, little plastic baggie that had the Critical Hit Cookies dragon logo stamped on it. They were packed throughout the box; fishing out all of them took a fair bit of time, and while the pessimist in me noted that it took a fair bit of time to find all of the cookies inside of the box, the kid in me loved the treasure hunt for cookies amidst the treasure-paper. Also included is was a bit of cardstock with a bit of advertisement for Critical Hit Cookies and a signed thank you from Karee, written in gold sharpie. I too am a fan of gold sharpie, so this was much appreciated.
Onward to the cookies! If I was a Pathfinder Second Edition RPG character, my ancestry would be something like “Sweettooth Human,” because literally everyone in my immediate family has a sweet tooth; even my sister, who does the low-sugar diet (bless her tenacity). Naturally, my family was super excited to hear that I had purchased cookies, and everyone tried at least one. (Of course the rest of the cookies were MINE. I BOUGHT them. They can’ts haves them!) Now, obviously taste is subjective and not everyone appreciates the same food textures, so I can only speak from our experiences eating Critical Hit Cookies, but here’s a brief summary of our experiences eating the Chocolate Chip Crunch Blondes.
- They are decadently delicious.
- They are really moist, one might say almost gooey in texture. Yet despite of being a fairly gooey cookie, they also have this unique crunchy texture to them that I’ve never had in a cookie before. Based on the ingredients list, I think this was the addition of Rice Krispees to the blonde. I can’t stress how much this added to the cookie’s enjoyability.
- The cookie hit the perfect balance between cookie and chocolate ratio. The chocolate didn’t overpower the cookie taste, and the cookie taste didn’t overpower the chocolate. It was truly a blissful balance of sugary flavors.
After my family tried their cookies and we discussed their flavors, I quickly grabbed the rest, brought them into my office, and hid them. THEY ARE MINESES! THEY CAN’T HAVE THE COOKIES! Needless to say, I really enjoyed these cookies and have recently placed an order for more.
In Conclusion,
Tie-in products like coffee and cookies for nerds inherently have me skeptical. I’m not big on the pandering, so things like the Goblin Brand coffee or the Song of Ice and Fire liquor sets don’t really appeal to me. Like, you can’t just slap a fantasy name onto a food product and expect me to go all crazy over it. I’m not 12 years old; I want a quality product. So obviously, I was a little bit skeptical at first ordering from Critical Hit Cookies. This seemed like a bakery that was just trying to cater to nerds, and putting a dragon on the logo and naming your cookies after nerd culture isn’t enough to make me interested in your product.
I originally decided to order myself some Critical Hit Cookies after Know Direction’s head honcho and resident G.I. Joe fanatic Ryan Costello bought a few dozen of them and mailed them to Paizo’s Warehouse crew as a gift. We got immediate feedback that these cookies were special, and so I decided to order myself a dozen. After all, we’re in the middle of a pandemic with death tolls mounting and increasing evidence of election tampering NO SORROW ONLY COOKIES! Let me tell you, readers, I am SO glad I bought these cookies. Critical Hit Cookies is the opposite of the kind of company that I’m wary of. The cookies themselves are phenomenal; they are artistically baked by someone who is clearly a gourmet baker AND a nerd. The product is delicious and the nerd trappings are genuine. I thought the dragon iconography and the “cookie horde” aesthetics were adorable, not asphyxiating, and the product was so wonderful that I felt I could proudly share them with nerds and non-nerds alike. This is one damn fine cookie, and I highly recommend Critical Hit Cookies for all your needs, whether it’s for your next TTRPG session, to share a special treat with your family, or to save off the crushing despair of the prospect of another year of quarantine under a science-denying administration NO SAD ONLY SUGAR.
Until next time, I’m Alexander Augunas and I’m signing out!
