Who Invented The Brookie, The Most Delicious Dessert On Earth?

One man’s stomach investigates.

They say the best things in life find you when you’re not looking for them — love, dream jobs and desserts. My boyfriend came home last week and mentioned our local grocery store had something called a “brookie” for sale. “What’s a brookie?” I asked. “Go to the store,” he urged. I dashed to the shop to investigate. I’m a lover of baked goods — cakes, cookies, pies, brownies, cupcakes. I won’t say no to ice cream or a high-fructose-corn-syrup-based snackable, but for my sugar calories, baked things are where it’s at. My adulation probably stems from my mother feeding me Little Debbie cakes as a child, with the result that they became subconscious symbols for love. But this isn’t about me. It’s about the brookie.

There they were: plastic clamshells overflowing with brownies with chocolate chip M&M cookies baked on top. After weighing each container in my hands to maximize brookie weight and eventually my own, I selected my beloved, raced home and took my first brookie bite. The brookie is everything you love about a brownie plus everything you love about a cookie, which creates a thing you love more than a brownie or a cookie.

“Enough to give Paula Deen’s diabetes diabetes,” a friend said after trying the brookies I brought to a party. “It was good. It tasted like a brownie with cookies on top. I enjoyed it,” said another, more matter-of-fact friend. But who invented this delicious treat? Who was I to thank for changing my life, and curse for enabling my sugar addiction? My investigation began.

Suspect #1: Milk + Brookies

I took to the internet to track down the treat’s creator. “It’s more like a party in your mouth,” said Jovon English, owner of LA-based Milk + Brookies, a bakery with pop-ups dedicated to the treat. “But not just any party—it is that party that you really didn’t want to go to but you promised your best friend that you would and you secretly hoped they forgot, then you get there and it is literally the best party you have ever been to in your life. Yeah, it’s that party…” The mouth party made its way onto the investor pitch show Shark Tank in October 2015. The Sharks didn’t bite, but the business did get a bump from the appearance. “In one word, being on Shark Tank was EXTRAORDINARY for business,” Jovon tells me. “People still make reference to our appearance when placing orders, or recognize us from the show…and our episode aired nearly a year ago.” I chatted with Jovon via email over the weekend. In between baking batches of brookies, which are cooked in cupcake tins and clock in at 270 calories, he answered this sweet tooth’s tough questions. Unsurprisingly, one of Milk + Brookies’ top four sellers is the OG: a fudge brownie + chocolate chip cookie. It naturally follows, then, that the remaining three faves would be peanut butter-, caramel- and white-chocolate-based. Try them all (the OG, Peanut Butter, Turtle and Blondie) next time you’re in LA. Jovon’s brookies inspire something like fervor among devotees. “We have had some interesting responses, proposals for marriage, requests to move us in so they can have brookies on demand, funny things like that,” he told me. Finally, I hit him with my real question: Did Milk + Brookies invent the brookie? Jovon laughed (or at least, he wrote “HAHAHA” in his email). “That is a question that we are often asked,” he said. “No, we did not create the brookie, but we did perfect it.” A dead end. My stomach continued its search…

Suspect #2: National pizza chains

Around the same time Milk + Brookies came to national attention, two popular pizza chains were hopping on the brookie bandwagon. Last September, Domino’s unveiled the Marble Cookie Brownie, a nine-square cookie/brownie hybrid. Instead of a cookie on top of a brownie, the composite parts are more fluid. Also, the dish doesn’t go by “brookie,” but a brookie by any other name still tastes as sweet.

“I’m not sure if we considered ‘brookie’ or not as the name,” said Jenny Fouracre, Director of Public Relations at Domino’s. But who invented this treat? “There is not an ‘inventor’ as we have a team of people who work on product development,” Fouracre says. Hmmmm. A likely story! Three months later, competitor Papa John’s unveiled their latest dessert menu item.

“Fudgy, rich, and delicious: this sinful, eggy chocolate lava had vesicles of flaky crust on top but still melted in my hands and mouth alike,” wrote The Impulsive Buy, who tasted it in January 2016. “The thin bed of cookie magma it sat on was largely undetectable, but still contributed some welcome bursts of buttered dough flavor.” Papa John’s brookie changed the game, featuring the cookie underneath the brownie and served like a pie. The Papa John’s Brookie is also no longer available. Today, their website callously features cookies and brownies as individual menu items. Papa John’s did not return requests for comment.

Suspect #3: Pinterest

Disappointed by two false leads, but determined to get answers, I continued to search. So I went where no man has gone before: Pinterest. Pins after pins cascaded down my screen. Brookies of all shapes, sizes, colors and caloric levels assaulted me with their brazen deliciousness.

There was a two-faced cookie/brownie with slightly more cookie than brownie.

There was a slice of brookie pie like Papa John’s (gone too soon), but with an elevating scoop of chocolate ice cream.

With what appeared like an endless list of recipes before me, how could I separate the cookies from the brownies to find who started it all?

So…whodunit?

It’s tough for a detective to admit failure, but I’ll never be able to answer the question of who invented the brookie. There are too many possibilities and too many types of brookie to ever conclusively nail the perpetrator. Perhaps the idea divinely appeared in kitchens across the globe? Perhaps it was invented accidentally, like the chocolate chip cookie itself? Perhaps archaeologists will one day unearth a scroll in Mesopotamia that reveals the perfect ratio of cookie to brownie and its original maker? While we may never find a single individual we can credit as the inventor of the brookie, I have one final suspect we can all agree on as the likely creator of this monstrously delicious delight: our stomachs.