The origins of Utah’s pink sugar cookie
The Classic Pink Sugar cookie, once a regular part of Crumbl’s menu, is now a rotating cookie. It will appear on the menu only a few times a year.
In a response to customer feedback, Crumbl announced the change on Instagram. Instead of Classic Pink Sugar being a permanent menu item, that slot will be filled by other cookies on the chain’s rotating menu.
Crumbl’s milk chocolate and semisweet chocolate chip cookies will rotate every other week and the rest of the menu will be filled with Crumbl’s other flavors, like lemon cream pie or strawberry cake.
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Crumbl co-founder Sawyer Hemsley commented on the post announcing the change, “This means there will be a fun new flavor in place of Classic Pink Sugar every week! This will allow a lot more cookie profiles to rotate on our menu yearly.”
It’s not the first time Classic Pink Sugar has been removed from the main menu. In April 2022, the cookie was removed from the permanent menu, per Today. Fans of the cookie were upset by its removal.
The cookie didn’t stay gone for long.
By August, Crumbl announced the reappearance of Classic Pink Sugar on the permanent menu in an Instagram post. The cookie had an updated recipe, too. “We tested our recipe across the nation and made improvements to bring you the perfect sugar cookie — a vanilla cookie topped with a perfect pink swoop of real almond frosting!”
Crumbl’s sugar cookies aren’t the only ones generously frosted with pink frosting.
At Swig, Sodalicious and other places, you’ll find sugar cookies with a similar shade of pink frosting across the top of them. Just like sodas with Italian syrups are a Utah cultural phenomenon so are pink sugar cookies.
If you stop at a bakery or soda shop, it’s not uncommon to pick up a big, heavy sugar cookie with a thick layer of pink frosting on top. The cookies are often served chilled alongside a soda.
So where they did come from?
The origins of pink sugar cookies
There’s a Sinclair gas station in Santa Clara, Washington County, with a store called Dutchman’s Market. Like other gas station stores, the inside is full of typical road trip snacks. There’s also a boutique with country-style goods to boot, but what you won’t want to miss is the bakery.
As it turns out, Dutchman’s Market is the original home of the pink sugar cookie. Nick Frei, owner of Dutchman’s Market, told St. George News that the store started making pink sugar cookies by following a family recipe.
At one point, the soda shop Swig served pink sugar cookies from Dutchman’s Market. Frei said to St. George News, “When Swig first opened they were selling our cookie; for the first year-and-a-half to two years they were using our cookie and now they are not.”
Dutchman’s sugar cookies are still sold at several different soda shops like Elevated Sips, Soda Vine, Thirst, Sip-N and others, according to the Dutchman’s Market website.
Pink sugar cookies have appeared at other stores since their reported invention at Dutchman’s. Sodalicious sells one, so does Ruby Snap and so does Crumbl. The Crumbl Classic Pink Sugar was inspired by a community group known as the Pink Ladies, who sold pink sugar cookies at the local hospital, according to Hemsley. He said his family loved the taste of almond in the cookies when he was growing up.
The recipes of these cookies differ from each other — some have more of a vanilla taste, others have more of an almond taste, others have a slight lemon flavor. But pale pink frosting adorns them all.
