[Photo: Jessica Leibowitz]

My neighborhood bakery growing up was Palo Alto Baking Company, the sort of straightforward shop I'm sure many suburban towns still have: cookies and breads and birthday cakes, decent sandwiches, French-ish pastries. Everything pretty tasty, nothing too memorable. Except, in the case, of Palo Alto Baking, the Swissies.

Every year for decades, we've ordered bags and bags of these teeny cookies at Christmastime. (Every year I'm convinced my dad bought too many, but they inevitably disappear.) Light and thin, they're a little more on the savory side than most cookies; if they were British I'd call them biscuits. They're somewhat sweet, of course, but barely so, more buttery and salty and super-crumbly in texture. Almost like teeny pecan sandies, but much thinner and smaller. They're studded with teeny bits of pecans and sized so that they don't feel like real cookies, so it's easy to eat them a bag at a time. Like potato chips, or cereal straight out of the box.

I've never seen Swissies anywhere else; a quick Internet search turns up a few other Bay Area bakeries that sell them, but nothing else. Have you ever heard of Swissies? Or do you know these addictively snackable cookies by another name?

Palo Alto Baking Company

381 South California Avenue, Palo Alto CA 94306 (map)
650-321-3234
paloaltobakingco.com