This New Bakery Delivers Extra-Thick and Gooey ‘Pudge’ Cookies

’Tis the season for both cookies and packages, and there’s a cute new bakery in the South Bay that’s delivering both.

Batch 22 Bakery is a deceptively small operation working out of a licensed home kitchen in Cupertino, but though the bakery is little, the cookies are immense. Baker Amy Wong is offering big cookies and big flavor, which she says are extra thick, exactly six ounces, good and gooey at the center, never too sweet, rather toasty, buttery, and truly flavorful. Her brother dubbed them “pudges” because “they’re so fat,” Wong clarifies. It’s a name that has caught on with cookie fans, who are now ordering Batch 22 pudges for pickup and delivery across the Bay.

Wong describes herself as a somewhat reluctant cookie entrepreneur. A former marketer with a sweet tooth, she says she fell in love with big cookies on a trip to Levain in New York, the 90s bakery chain known for its oversize cookies. “It totally rocked my world ... ” Wong says. “It was huge. I was like, what the heck is this? It was like nothing I had tried anywhere else. It wowed me in every way.” She came home and started replicating that cookie, then iterating her own recipes, developing different flavors, and pushing cookies on friends at the gym.

But it wasn’t until the pandemic hit that she ever considered baking professionally. She quit a marketing job two weeks before lockdown with every intention of finding another. But instead, her personal and professional partner Lawrance Combs applied for a cottage food license and set up a business plan. Wong bakes out of her family’s home kitchen at their house in Cupertino, while she and Combs live nearby in a small apartment in Sunnyvale.

There are plenty of good cookies in San Francisco and the Bay Area, but cookie obsessives are serious about style, and while many bakeries put out thin, chewy, crunchy, or lacy cookies, Wong knows what she likes and sweats the details. She says that with a bigger cookie, she can reduce the sugar, and maintain moisture, while teasing out more flavor. In particular, she says her Asian American customers love a cookie that’s less sweet. She uses all butter, sometimes browned, and chilled until firm. She creams it for a long time, to incorporate plenty of air, to avoid it getting too dense. And she always chills overnight to fully hydrate the dough and let the flavor bloom. The results are a cookie that holds its height in the oven, keeps its moisture even the second day, and with a quick flash reheat (which she recommends), that magic bite that goes from golden on the outside to gooey at heart.

Batch 22 Bakery offers half a dozen pudges at any given time, with flavors that rotate seasonally, from bright green matcha to coal black cocoa to festive pumpkin spice; sometimes they’re stuffed with marshmallow, cheesecake, or ganache. Wong’s personal favorite was a summery pink lemonade. “I would bet someone a hundred bucks you cannot find a cookie with more lemony flavor on the West Coast,” she says. The most labor-intensive was the campfire s’more cookie, which included brown butter, homemade graham crunch, and precisely seven mini marshmallows, which would pull apart even at room temperature. Batch 22 also offers more classic chocolate chip cookies (read: thinner) and shortbread and sandies (read: crunchier), if you have to deal with someone in your household who’s into that kind of thing.

For now, Batch 22 Bakery does pickup and delivery only, either directly through the website for the South Bay, or via Pastel for the rest of the Bay Area. For direct orders, preorders are due on Tuesdays, deliveries are on Thursdays, and pickups are on Fridays. Eventually, Wong hopes to open her own storefront.