The Delicate Glory of Rustic Bakery's Almond & Cacao Nib Sticks

Rustic Bakery

Almond & Cacao Sticks.

​Despite practicing for a lifetime, your young Cook E. Monster can still be quite the amateur reporter when it comes to not watching how the cookie can crumble. No sooner did we get this week's precious loot home that we discovered most of it had already been destroyed along the way.

Rooting through, we found one to photograph and started styling it for its closeup, only to have it slip through our fingers, fip in the air in a slow motion style, and shatter on the ground. Luckily, Rustic Bakery in Larkspur is savvy enough to have nice product shots, so we can present this image of these lovely Almond & Cacao Nib Sticks.

Our research mishaps actually revealed an important quality of these treats. Stick cookies can often be as hard as doorstops; dropping them on the ground wouldn't do much of anything. Almonds that have been skinned and finely chopped provide what bit of heft these do have and also keep the slight bitterness of the cacao nibs (otherwise known as roasted chocolate bean innards) from being the top note. These are our favorite sticks of the moment.

Rustic Bakery had a great 2011, opening cafes in Larkspur (1139 Magnolia Ave.) and Novato (1407 Grant Ave.). Many of its products are carried at the finer shops around town, but we found the Almond & Cacao Sticks at Rainbow Grocery (1745 Folsom St.).

Just don't expect them to look as pretty as a picture once you get them to their destination.