Cookie sandwich or cornbread? A dessert that thrives in the in-between

Where does sweet stop and savory begin?

Somewhere in that murky middle ground — where salt meets sugar, where fat meets fruit — that’s where the best desserts live. Not the delicate meringues or the aggressively frosted cupcakes of childhood birthday parties, but the muscular, memory-laced ones. The kind that taste like something more than dessert. Like something lived in.

Maybe that’s a personal thing. I didn’t grow up in a big-dessert household. Sure, there were treats: my mom’s chocolate chip cookies on Friday nights, Chips Ahoy stashed in the pantry, those era-defining SnackWell’s packets in their austere green boxes. But the heavy-hitters — the truly decadent stuff — were rare and ceremonial.

Costco’s double-layer chocolate cake, as glossy and dark as patent leather church shoes (or in Novembers, their pumpkin pie so wide it comes with its own corrugated cardboard undercarriage). A slice of Cheesecake Factory’s Reese’s Peanut Butter Chocolate Cake Cheesecake — a name with the heft of the dessert itself. These were desserts that required an occasion. Birthdays. Holidays. A family member’s retirement. Something worthy of whipped topping.

I think that’s exactly why foods in that liminal space between sweet and savory have always felt like home to me — they were the closest thing I had to dessert on an ordinary day. A biscuit split open and slathered with strawberry preserves. A dinner roll the size of a closed fist, its warmth melting a knob of cinnamon butter into something almost scandalous. The cheddar-bacon corn cakes from a neighborhood brunch spot I found years later, always served with a pour of maple syrup that turned breakfast into something more indulgent.

But the apex, the gold standard, was always cornbread.

Cornbread with honey butter. Cornbread with jam. Cornbread in any configuration that managed to hit sweet, salty, rich and warm all at once.

Even the humblest meals — like Crock Pot pinto beans ladled into chipped bowls after the Sunday night church services of my childhood — felt a little more indulgent when there was cornbread on the table. It was the upgrade. The thing that made dinner feel just a little more like a treat.

That’s where the idea for these cookies came from.

There’s a long tradition,  especially in Asia, of desserts that borrow from the savory — leaning into umami, coaxing sweetness out of ingredients more often found in soups than sweets. Take mitarashi dango, for instance: chewy rice dumplings glazed in a lacquer of sweet soy sauce, both smoky and bright. Or the parfaits served at Kamebishi Co., one of Japan’s oldest soy sauce brewers, where soy sauce gelato melts into something creamy and briny, like a tide pool made decadent. Even pastry maestro Tsujiguchi Hironobu has ventured into this terrain, folding a heavy, two-year-aged soy sauce into custard cream for his Nanaotorii Roll Cake — an interplay of salt and sugar that feels at once earthy and ethereal.

The savory-sweet overlap has found itself in home kitchens, too: in the rich, toasty edge that miso lends a chocolate chip cookie; in the glossy snap of soy sauce-infused caramels; and, of course, in the cult status of Alison Roman’s salted shortbreads — the viral cookie that launched a thousand riffs, all singing with that same salty counterpoint.

But if you’ve already graduated to desserts that play with salt and umami, here’s a little technical secret: another way to bring in the savory element is through texture. Take cornmeal: an ingredient most often associated with warm-weather classics like battered fish or cornbread. In a cookie, it does more than just add a grainy crunch. It brings an earthy heft that you can’t get from flour alone, like the bite of a cornmeal-crusted pie or the dense texture of a polenta cake.

I decided to lean into that. Instead of chasing smoothness, I embraced the coarser texture of cornmeal, letting it resist cohesion. The batter isn’t elegant. It smells faintly of vanilla, honey and corn — like a memory of an open field just after a storm. It resists cohesion. The cornmeal holds its ground, forming tiny, fragrant clumps when it meets melted butter and egg. It’s grainy on the tongue, like crushed gravel. Like my grandfather’s driveway in summer.

I sandwiched the cookies around a honey buttercream — thick, unapologetically rich — and a smear of blackberry jam that cuts through the fat with brightness (optional, but truly lovely). There’s no subtlety here. It’s loud. It’s messy. It’s good.

And each bite is a little portal.

One takes me back to a Pimento Cheese Social at the Stitzel-Weller Distillery in Kentucky, one of my first Derby assignments. The air was swampy with heat. I drank bourbon over ice and bummed a cigar off a man in a seersucker suit. Another bite lands me on a patio in South Carolina, asking for a second ramekin of honey butter to go alongside a hot basket of cornbread-like hushpuppies like I have no shame. Another still takes me to my grandmother’s kitchen — apple-themed, always — with a half-used jar of Smucker’s blackberry jam wedged between the Miracle Whip and the fat-free Italian dressing.

These cookies are mine—not just because I made them, but because they’re built from the little food memories I’ve carried with me. Part treat, part terrain. The sweet spot, after all, isn’t about neatness or perfection. It’s the blurry middle ground where sweet and savory shake hands, where the unexpected happens and where the best things are often a little messy.