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A pandemic-born bakery pop-up known for its giant 6-ounce cookies has found a permanent home.
Opening Thursday, May 14, in Los Gatos, Batch 22’s new brick-and-mortar bakery will offer co-founder Amy Wong’s signature seasonally-rotating “pudges” as well as smaller cookies, coffee and milk. Inspired by Levain Bakery‘s famous crunchy and chewy 6-ounce cookies, Wong has developed a lineup of nearly 20 unique flavors – including matcha white chocolate and ube dulcey, featuring ube, caramelized white chocolate and toffee – with eight flavors available at the shop at a time.
“A lot of them have a crisp outer edge but are very soft in the center,” said Lawrance Combs, Batch 22 co-founder and Wong’s life partner.
The pudges ($7 each), named by Wong’s brother for being “large and fat and cute,” have also been described as tender and melty, according to Wong.
“It’s so easy to get through half or three quarters of a pudge without even blinking,” she said.
Batch 22 was founded in 2020, stemming from Wong’s pandemic hobby of making Japanese milk bread. She had just quit her marketing job and was quarantining with Combs.
“I told her that if she didn’t start working on her resume soon, as a joke, that I would get all the paperwork done and I would start her a bakery so that she could at least make some money off of all of this bread she’s wasting,” Combs said.
The joke turned into reality. But instead of focusing on milk bread, which proved comparatively difficult, Wong decided to set her sights on cookies. Combs, a gymnastics coach, helped with the business side of Batch 22, as he already had business experience with his gymnastics grip company.
Their cottage food operation didn’t offer pudges at the beginning, just the smaller 1.5-ounce cookies, now referred to as “classics” on the Batch 22 menu. Classics flavors include Earl Grey milk chocolate; dulcey chocolate chip, which features browned butter, toffee, caramelized white chocolate, toasted pecans and flaky salt; and gourmet chocolate chip, featuring the same ingredients as dulcey but with dark chocolate instead of white, plus miso. Each classic cookie goes for $2.25.
Inspired by a trip to New York in 2016, Wong developed her take on a Levain cookie, starting with oatmeal raisin and creating recipes for additional flavors. The hardest recipe to develop was ginger molasses, which Wong created 26 versions of before deciding it was ready for market. Other flavors that were a labor of love to develop were pink lemonade and red velvet.
Wong developed all Batch 22 cookie flavors, except one: matcha, which Combs developed.
“That was because Amy said that we couldn’t make matcha into a pudge,” he said. “That was the only contribution I made in terms of baking.”
New offerings at the brick-and-mortar bakery include dark chocolate orange pudges, Verve dark roast coffee, iced coffee and lactose-free whole milk in a jar. Located in a former phone repair store, Batch 22 is takeaway only, featuring a glass display case at the center of the room and a cartoon cookie mural on one of the walls.
Baking is now done in-house at the Los Gatos location instead of the commercial kitchen in Santa Clara, and the delivery radius will change from centered around Beastea in Santa Clara to the Los Gatos brick and mortar. Weekend pop-ups and pickups will continue at Beastea, and Batch 22’s cookies will still pop-up at T4 Palo Alto as well, Wong said.
Wong and Combs, who live in Sunnyvale, don’t plan on rapidly expanding the company nor franchising. At most, they said they’d want to have two or three stores.
“Our reputation right now is really strong in terms of how people perceive our pudges, how people perceive our service and how we handle things, and we don’t want that to fall off,” Combs said. “We want to be a quality-first business.”
During its grand opening from May 15-18, Batch 22 will be giving away mini totes and cookies, according to Wong.
Batch 22 Bakery, 15466 Los Gatos Blvd. #113, Los Gatos; 408-904-9366, Instagram: @batch22bakery. Beginning May 15, open Thursday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m.
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