Levain Bakery’s limited-edition Café Con Leche cookie helps support Harlem Grown
Photo by Kate Previte
Levain Bakery isn’t usually one for special collaborations or seasonal flavors (why mess with a good thing?!), but a new limited-edition cookie launching today will both make your mouth water and do good. A portion of sales, up to $10,000, from the Café Con Leche cookie will be donated to two youth-based community organizations–Harlem Grown here in NYC and Horton’s Kids in Washington, D.C.
The Café Con Leche came out of Levain’s newest location in Georgetown, D.C., the first outside NYC. To celebrate the opening in September, Levain co-founders Pam Weekes and Connie McDonald worked with local pastry chef Paola Velez to create a special cookie inspired by Paola’s childhood memories of sipping café con leche with her grandmother in the Dominican Republic. The cookie is Levain’s standard six ounces and it features their dark chocolate cookie base with added notes of cinnamon and espresso and is then studded with cashews and two types of Valrhona chocolate.
Chef Velez is the executive pastry chef for D.C. restaurants Maydan, Compass Rose, and La Bodega, as well as the co-founder of Latin-American donut pop-up Doña Dona. She is also the co-founder of Bakers against Racism, a virtual bake sale that took place this past summer to raise money for organizations that support Black lives Matter (to date, it has raised over $2 million). So it’s no surprise that her collaboration with Levain also has a social justice angle.
In addition to donating to Harlem Grown–a Harlem-based youth development nonprofit utilizing food justice as a vehicle for social transformation–sales from the cookie in D.C. will support Horton’s Kids.
“As we continue to grow as a company, we feel fortunate to be able to give back to organizations that enrich the lives of our neighbors, and Café Con Leche was created with that charitable spirit in mind,” says the Levain team.
If you’re interested in trying out the cookie, it’s available starting today at all of Levain’s NYC locations–Upper West Side, Upper East Side, Harlem, Noho, and Williamsburg.
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