East Idaho Eats: You can’t walk away with just one cookie from The Cookie Cottage

RIGBY — Inside a white cottage with gray shutters and a pink door, you will smell and see freshly baked cookies, lemon bars and cake pops that you can’t ignore.

“My favorite cookie that we have would have to be our chai cookie. It’s just a great chai spice, and we actually are having it for the fall a lot because it’s that nice kind of warm flavor and any of our pumpkin cookies as well. Those are absolutely amazing, although I do love to have our huckleberry because it is just a town favorite,” said Ayla Ross, manager at The Cookie Cottage.

Ross has been working at The Cookie Cottage for about seven months. She loves baking cookies on a daily basis.

Tim Hodgson, who owns The Cookie Cottage told EastIdahoNews.com the business has been around for five years.

Hodgson is known by several in the community. He played the fiddle at the Bar J Chuckwagon in Jackson, Wyoming for 34 years. The property in Jackson ended up getting sold, which meant he was out of a job.

“I really didn’t know what I wanted to do, and then when I saw this place available (The Cookie Cottage), I knew the owner from fiddle contests, and she put this up for sale, and I thought, ‘Why not?’” Hodgson said.

Hodgson has been the owner for about eight months and has been enjoying it. He said one of the most popular items on the menu is called the minis. He sells mini sugar cookies, which are delicious and have pink frosting on top with sprinkles.

“Those are probably in our top three or four cookies that we sell. We call it our basic, but that’s what most people think about when they think about a sugar cookie. This recipe is a unique recipe. I have never seen anything like it before, and it makes for a good cookie, and of course the frosting — how can you go wrong?” he said.

All the cookies are made in-house.

“We just bake all day, every day. We make icings constantly and make them as fresh as we can,” said Ross.

Another popular flavor is the huckleberry cookie.

“It’s on the vanilla sugar cookie base but that’s probably our most popular cookie. I think huckleberry around Eastern Idaho is kind of a big deal and people really seem to like that cookie. It’s got little bits of fruit in it, and we make everything fresh here using fresh ingredients,” said Hodgson.

There are over 100 cookie flavors, and Hodgson said they try not to have the same cookies for a long period of time.

“I would say we have well over 100 flavors of cookies, 120 or so, and that’s cookies with frosting combinations. We probably have a dozen different kinds of sugar cookies that we do. We do chocolate chip cookies, and those are really popular, and a lot of specialty cookies. We have lemon cookies, which we haven’t had for a while because they are really popular through the spring and the summer,” he said.

Besides cookies, they also have cake pops. One of those flavors is the coconut cake pop.

“It’s coconut cake inside and then the white chocolate coating has some coconut flavoring and then some toasted coconut on top. It has a good bite to it,” said Hodgson.

They have a lemon bar too.

“We do several different bars, and that’s probably the most popular one of the ones we do. That one (the lemon bar) and our magic bars. A magic bar is basically a graham cracker sort of a crust with chocolate and sweetened condensed milk and coconut and it’s toasty on top. They are really good,” he said.

The Cookie Cottage is open on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays from noon to 6 p.m. Hodgson and Ross said they sell out often, and they love it when it happens on Fridays.

“That’s our goal — to just get to the point where we sell out at 5:59 p.m. on Friday,” he said.

On the days that The Cookie Cottage is closed, Hodgson said they are baking and delivering to soda shops because they have contracts with them.

“We do at least 1,000 cookies and sometimes more that we provide to these soda shops and then they sell them,” he said.

The Cookie Cottage is at 143 South Clark Street in Rigby. Click here to like them on Facebook.