The outside window of Insomnia Cookies.
If there’s one thing I can always count on College Park for, it’s a greasy after-hours snack. On any given night of the week, I’m only a short walk or brief phone call away from a Pizza Kingdom jumbo slice, a D.P. Dough customized calzone or a Jimmy John’s sandwich in all of its mayonnaise glory. On the rare occasions I’m craving something sweet, though, I settle for stale Pop-Tarts or a disappointing Commons Shop milkshake.
I envied my friends attending other universities who told me about Insomnia Cookies: warm, sweet and delivered right to their laps in the middle of a late-night study session (or the more frequent Netflix binge). I wondered how College Park could sleep on such crucial cuisine. But when I arrived on the campus just last week, I was pleasantly shocked to see my long-standing dilemma had been solved in the summer months: Insomnia Cookies had finally found its way to Route 1.
As a senior who has endured three long years with nothing to satisfy my sweet tooth, I immediately felt the desperate need to make up for lost time. So, after a grueling first day of syllabus-reading, I opened my laptop and made my inaugural order one to remember, asking for one of each kind of cookie the shop had.
I started with a classic: chocolate chunk. Still hot from the oven, with one bite the chunks melted in my mouth. If it weren’t for the fact that my sensitive smoke alarm stayed silent, I would’ve sworn I had baked them from scratch myself.
I ventured further outside my comfort zone, grabbing both a snickerdoodle and white chocolate macadamia in one fell swoop, suddenly doing the dessert equivalent of double-fisting. The two were similar to sugar cookies, though somehow even more rich and saccharine. I knew I’d soon feel sick from the sweetness but chose to ignore it. Instead, I licked my lips and marched on in my cookie mission.
Three down, I decided to take a relative break from the sugar rush with a more wholesome oatmeal raisin. The cookie, which undeservedly gets a bad rap, was hearty with crunchy oats and chock-full of fresh raisins.
Next on the agenda was a peanut butter cookie that, so full with its gooey namesake, nearly glued my mouth shut. Somehow, I forced my teeth apart and dug into a double chocolate mint. I was met with a refreshing blast of simultaneous confection and cool, like a Girl Scout Thin Mint on steroids.
Finishing the rest of the box was a blur, followed quickly by the inevitable cookie-induced coma. I can’t safely say when I resurfaced, but I did knowing Insomnia Cookies had changed my life. I bid adieu to all my former savory late-night bites like ex-boyfriends because I’ve finally found The One.
