Happy Sunday to all you guys. If you are reading this, I hope you've had a wonderful day so far and you're sitting relaxed on your couch with a cup of coffee & a Dohful cookie in your hand. 

 

First of all, I would like to welcome the 316 people who have subscribed to us this week. If you are new here, do hit the reply button and tell us how you liked today's letter.

 

If you're not new, you know how much I love it when you guys write to me, so don't be shy. Hit that reply button!

 
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Welcome to this week's Sunday Letter, today we're going to answer the Number 1 question that I get from you guys. 

 

When Are You Launching a New Flavour?

 

Obviously, the answer is way more complicated that the question and it opens a pandora's box I would have rather left alone.

 

But I had promised you guys that I will talk about anything and everything you want me to talk about and here we are. 

 

So make sure you read till the end because who knows, I might just give you the answer to that million dollar question!

 
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Every few weeks or so, I get sit down with my list of fantasy cookie variants, which nothing but a list of all the crazy, whacky, not-so-whacky, and/or great-potential cookie ideas that I keep writing whenever I have them.

 

So once I have the list with me, I usually start with a quick scan and pruning out whichever ideas I feel are too whacky to be even tried. Like once I written about a Sourdough Chocolate Chip cookie but soon realised that the last thing anyone needs is a sour cookie of any sort.

 

Anyways, so coming back to the list, this is where the story of every single Dohful cookie starts.

 
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And to me, the story is as important as the actually cookie right. I mean Why I'm launching a new flavour is more important to me than actually launching it.

 

It's quite simple, actually. If I have a great Why to launch a cookie, like I had a great reason to launch Dohful, I will find a way. It took me 70 days to crack my first recipe in Dohful, but I was able to do it, because I knew we had to introduce you guys to soft baked cookies.

 

That was a big enough Why for me.

 

Similarly, if I know what kind of cookie I'm trying to make, what kind of craving of yours I'm trying to satisfy, or what kind of taste I'm trying to bring out, I will keep researching till I get it.

 
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For instance when we were launching Nutella Lava Cookie, Chaman was very particular of the fact that we want it to be as gooey as possible because that was what the Nutella Cookie was all about.

 

It was going to be a blast of Nutella in your mouth, plain and simple. So we did over 20 trials trying the determine, what was the maximum amount of Nutella we could fill in the cookie without leaking any of it during baking.

 

For Choco Brownie cookie I had done endless trials to come up with that perfect fudgy texture that is there in the center piece of a Brownie.

 
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Once I have identified the cookies I'd like start experimenting with, we usually do a couple of in-house trials to figure out the intensity of flavours I like. For example, how chocolatey should the Choco Chunk cookie should be?

 

Or how many Macadamia Nuts should we put in a single cookie? Or how peanuty should the Peanut Butter Marble cookie should be.

 

And so on. This is the step where we finalise the taste and the flavour and the texture of the cookie. More often than not, Chaman is my go to guinea pig for these experiments.

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Next what comes is how easy to bake that cookie would be on a day to day basis. Because I don't want the perfect cookie that can be made only 1 day.

 

I want the perfect cookie that can be replicated every single day of the week. So this becomes a huge part of what we do. Making the same kind of cookies day in and day out and maintaining the same level of taste, texture and perfection for you.

 

And it's not just about the taste. Many a times, it's also about availability of certain ingredients. If you remember, Yin Yang cookie used to be limited edition only when we initially launched it.

 

That was because we weren't able to procure enough white chocolate which forms the core of the Yin Yang cookie. So we used to roll out a few hundred cookies every week and wait for the chocolate to be available again.

 

Thankfully it was resolved quickly and we were able to make it available to you guys permanently.

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The last but not the least step before we tell the world about any cookie - how long would the cookie last? I know we recommend that you eat all the cookies within 30 days but we have actually eaten 2 months old cookies as well.

 

Just to test how long would the cookies actually last in your home. We have frozen our own fully baked cookies to make them stay longer (as an experiment!), we have tried refrigerating them, keeping them on room temperature, re-heating or warming them before we eat and what not.

 

And the whole process happens every time we launch a new cookie. And this is the step that got skipped when we were launching the Strawberry & Chocolate Cookie.

 

I wouldn't say we missed it completely but yes the whole cookie went from trial to going live on the website in less than 10 days so it wasn't done as extensively as it should have been done.

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Fortunately or Unfortunately, 90% of all cookie flavours get dropped during one or more of these stages. Either the flavour wouldn't be so impactful as we imagined. 

 

Like it happened in case of a Coffee Cookie I was trying. No matter how hard I tried, the coffee flavour was not coming out that intense as I wanted it to be.

 

So no matter how badly I wanted to launch it, we had to drop the idea for the time-being.

 

A lot of flavours also get dropped during the procurement stage. One of the most recent example of that is the Biscoff cookie. We made an amazing Chocolate & Biscoff cookie but Biscoff is not an easy thing to find. And its certainly not well priced enough for us to launch it affordably.

 

So until something happens to correct that, we're basically stuck!

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And so many more cookies like these. All not launched for some reason or the other. But you know what guys, I'm happy that it happens this way and not any other way. Because I want to keep the highest standards of cookie making in Dohful.

 

I'd rather not launch any flavour than to just do it for the sake of it without having any rhyme or reason to do so. Remember that guy with 27 White Sauce Pastas from my last email? 

 

That's exactly who I don't want to become.

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I want you to know that whenever we do anything in Dohful we have the highest standards and expectations from ourselves in our mind.

 

And that's the only reason new cookie launches in Dohful are as in-frequent as they are. But trust me, as soon as we find that perfect cookie that will delight you as much as the other Dohful Cookies do, you'd be the first one to know! 

 

Till then, I hope you will continue enjoying your favorite cookies from Dohful.

P.S. Thank you for reading, if you're just here for the cookies, go right ahead, I will not mind at all! 

 

till next time,

 
 
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