Bagel Shop's Chocolate Options

One of our local eateries in Bloomington, Indiana, is the Bloomington Bagel Company.  On Monday afternoon, your Chocolate Priestess was downtown and went by the branch there to see if they had anything chocolaty.  She bought three items: Chocolate Chip Bagel, Chocolate Chip Cookie, and Chocolate Chip Scone.  There were some other chocolaty items but perhaps I'll review them later.  These three items were less than $4 so very affordable.

The Chocolate Chip Bagel was the same size of most bagels I've seen but it had very visible and large chocolate chips.  It was still soft in the afternoon when I bought it and still good the next morning when I toasted it.  You can toast chocolate chip bagels since baking chips are made to hold their shape better but don't over toast it, always watch it because melted chocolate in your toaster is a bad idea.  The chips were very semi-sweet in taste and were a good counter to the solid egg bagel taste surrounding them.  You don't really need to add anything to this and if you want to watch calories I recommend you just eat it plain, the chocolate is enough of a taste.  This is of similar quality to the same flavor of bagels I've gotten in other bakeries and in grocery stores.  These are a healthier option though because they are kettle-boiled not fried or baked.

The Chocolate Chip Cookie was very fragile and fairly flat at 0.25inches deep but it measured 5 X 5 inches across, more perfect than it first looked. It has mostly a sugar and butter scent to it, a very sugary doughy taste that seemed like it could have been baked for about two minutes more without becoming too crisp. It also had clumps of surprisingly sugary but cocoa chips, a very sweet semi-sweet I’d guess. This is not the best chocolate chip cookie I've bought so I can't honestly recommend it.

The Chocolate Chip Scone is the same diameter as the cookie but is 1.25 inches deep.  It was hard as you'd expect a scone to be but I don't really like hard so I did something to it.  I packed it away with the bagel and sealed them in a plastic bag overnight.  The result was a bagel that was just fine but a scone I can eat easily without feeling like I'm hurting my teeth.  The scone has identical chocolate chips to the cookie and bagel.  It is covered with large crystals of sugar over the entire top.  Sugar is and flour is really the only scent here even when I cut it in half and take a bit whiff of the chips.  The sugar really only tastes sweet when I'm directly tasting the top and the chips only taste chocolaty when I directly bite into them.  But this is what I expect of  a scone so I'm not disappointed.  This is a different shape for a scone while are usually rounded off rectangles and you get so much more cookie for the price that I think this is a good product though it isn't very dunkable into your coffee, milk or hot cocoa.

Ultimately you'd buy something from Bloomington Bagel Company because it was convenient or because you want to support a local business.  It isn't so convenient to me since I don't live near any of their three locations but when I'm near one it is worth my time to stop in for fairly average products at a great price.  The store has been around for a long time and is a local icon that contributes in many ways to the community.  Please do consider them the next time you are near one.