Popular Central Coast cookie company adds ‘farm to cup’ frozen custard to its mix
A nationally lauded Cayucos business has added soft and creamy to its trademark crumbly and chewy traditions: Brown Butter Cookie Company just launched its own version of frozen custard.
For those not familiar with frozen custard, it’s been a beloved dessert in the Northeast and Midwest for many decades.
Brown Butter Cookie Company, home of the brown butter sea salt and other hand-rolled shortbread and classic cookie varieties, has taken frozen custard a step further, adding their trademark West Coast twist of brown butter, vanilla and a touch of sea salt.
“We’ve been working on it for a couple of years,” co-owner Traci Alderson said Thursday.
She and sister and business partner Christa Alderson were determined to come up with “the best balance of texture and the sweetness of egg yolk as a great carrier for our brown butter flavor.”
“No artificial ingredients, no corn syrup, nothing artificial,” Alderson said. “What we call ‘farm to cup.’”
The current flavor is vanilla, but the sisters already are also testing other varieties.
They collaborated with Scott Bros. Dairy in Chino Hills, which, according to that firm’s website has for the past century or more been “producing our frozen yogurt, ice cream mixes and sour cream with our fresh milk from our family farm.”
When paired with one of Brown Butter’s cookies, the brown butter frozen custard provides “a harmonious fusion of flavors that will delight even the most discerning palate,” according to a Brown Butter Cookie Company news release.
It’s available now in the company’s flagship shop at 98 N. Ocean Avenue in Cayucos, and it should be in Brown Butter’s Paso Robles and San Luis Obispo retail stores by the end of summer.
The sisters’ Cayucos enterprise started in the early 2000s as The Little Market, a small deli, where they handed out their hand-rolled shortbread cookies as free treats to regular customers.
The cookies were an instant hit, flying off the shelves as people bought them by the dozen.
By 2009, the sisters had “listened to the cookie,” according to the company’s website. They closed the deli to focus on their very popular cookies as Brown Butter Cookie Company. They still provide free samples.
The business offers up to seven different flavors of those rounded, hand-rolled treats, including the 2024 flavor of the year, zesty lemon. It has an assortment of traditional cookie types, as well as another line of shortbread cookies featuring Ghiradelli chocolate. They even have two varieties of gluten-free cookies.
Now, in Brown Butter’s Atascadero production facility and Cayucos shop, the firm’s more than 60 employees can and have produced up to 10,000 of the cookies a day, which also can be ordered online.
For details, go to the Brown Butter Cookies website, call 805-464-6636 or check its Facebook or Instagram pages.
