KITCHY EATS

Diddy Riese Cookies

If you go to UCLA or my old high school, you have eaten so many of these cookies you can't look at another one until you graduate.  I know this, because for every meeting, dance, play, event, pop quiz, whatever someone would bring a Diddy-dozen to celebrate or soften the blow of yet another consecutive 7 out of 10 on those damn geometry pop quizzes.  The reasons why the Westwood area is flooded with these delicious cookies are simple: they're conveniently close, crazy delicious, and mind-bendingly cheap.  $3.75 for a dozen full sized cookies.  No wonder the school handed these out like late slips.  If you're new to the Diddy Riese world, here are some helpful tips:

1.  Never go at 10 pm.  There will be a line out of the door and perhaps wrapping around the block.  I'm not kidding or overstating this at all.  All of UCLA congregates at Diddy Riese at that time because it's after they've had their dinner and procrastinated all afternoon, and just before they'll need a sugar rush to push them through late night paper writing.  Or they're high.  One of the two.

2. Smuggle them.  I always grab a half dozen of these cookies and hide them in my purse when I go to one of the huge Westwood theaters (the Bruin or the Fox, where they have all of the premieres).  Mostly because Diddy Riese is 50 feet away from either one.  And also because I get thrills out of the lamest stuff, like smuggling cookies into the movie theater. 

3. Get an ice cream sandwich. I love scraping the black-brown moist cookie off of my fingers from those ice cream sandwiches you get out of a vending machine, but the Diddy Riese ice cream sandwich takes that visceral joy and brings it to a whole new level.  Two still warm cookies of your choice with whatever Dreyer's ice cream you like.  You could make a meta ice cream sandwich with cookie dough or cookies and cream in the middle.  Just a thought.  Incidentally, because the ice cream sandwich is fresh and not stamped together in a factory, it can take on the shape of a baseball.  So grab a lot of napkins and sit down to enjoy this treat.  You can spend an afternoon wrestling one of those things. Oh but they're soooo good.

4.  Try the candy cookie.  Yeah, I know, my first inclination was chocolate chip too, but their candy cookies are the best.  The candies are like molten capsules that explode chocolate in your mouth when you bite down.  My other favorite is the white chocolate macadamia nut and the cinnamon sugar, but it's candy cookie all the way.

Candy Cookie

White Chocolate Macadamia Nut Cookie

Cinnamon Sugar Cookie