A Cookie Bulb 💡🍪

You know that moment when something clicks?

When you ask yourself that quiet question: “Hang on a second. Why does this feel so wrong?”

That was our cookie bulb moment.

Firstly, we ate a lot of sweet snacks.

(And then felt a lot rubbish.)

My wife and I are snack people. Always have been.

Mid afternoon? Snack.
After dinner? A sweet treat.
Stressed? Snack.

Snacking was just part of our busy lifestyle.

But here’s the thing. We never loved how we felt afterwards.

Sometimes it was that heavy, sluggish feeling.
Sometimes it was the “why did I eat that much?” feeling.
And sometimes it was just confusion.

How much am I meant to eat?
Why does one snack feel fine and another feel like regret?
Why does something so small leave such a big crash?

Those feelings were quietly annoying and constant. 

When we really sat with it, the main problem was guilt.

At some point, it clicked.

The problem wasn’t snacking. The problem was what snacking had become.

• Ultra sweet.
• Ultra processed.
• Portion sizes that made no sense.
• Ingredients you couldn’t pronounce, let alone explain.

Everything felt designed to be eaten quickly and forgotten about. Except your body didn’t forget. It always remembered.

So we set ourselves a very unsexy, very simple goal:

Create snacks you don’t feel guilty eating.

No negotiating with yourself.
No “I’ll be good tomorrow.”
No post snack regret.

Just pure, guilt free enjoyment.

Then we asked ourselves something we hadn’t really questioned before.

Are we actually supposed to snack?

Here’s what surprised us.

Snacking itself isn’t the villain.

When we started reading properly, we realised that well timed, balanced snacks can actually help promote fullness and reduce overeating later on. They can help with energy too, especially when your next meal is still a long way off.

That challenged a belief we didn’t even realise we had.

The issue wasn’t that we were snacking “wrong”.
It was that most of the snacks available to us were doing us no favours.

The stuff on supermarket shelves that looks convenient and sounds healthy often isn’t.

Massive sugar spikes.
Very little nutritional value.
Incredibly easy to overeat.

Why is that?

Because these products are highly profitable.

They’re cheap to make.
They last forever.
And there’s very little regulation around what manufacturers can put in them or what they can say about them.

If something looks healthy enough and sells well, that’s usually good enough.

That didn’t sit right with us.

So we decided to try doing things differently.

We started with cookies.

Because obviously we did.

There were easier places to start.
There were more sensible places to start.

But cookies were always our comfort.
That perfect after dinner treat you look forward to without really thinking about it.

And usually… not great for you.

Starting with cookies felt a bit ridiculous. It also felt honest.

If we couldn’t make this work, then what were we really doing?

That’s when the question became very clear.

Can we make cookies that feel indulgent but behave better?
Can we keep the joy, the comfort, the familiarity?
Without the crash. Without the guilt.

No joy sacrificed in the process.

That cookie bulb moment wasn’t a single flash of inspiration.

It was a slow realisation.
A build-up of small frustrations.
A growing sense that things didn’t have to be this way.

Maybelle was never about a single recipe or a perfect cookie.

It’s about asking better questions about the foods we reach for every day.

Can this taste amazing and still make sense?
Can a cookie be joyful without being junky?
Can snacking feel good, both during and after?

We don’t have all the answers yet.

But the cookie bulb is on.

And we’re following it to see where it leads.

Still baking,
The Maybelle Team 🍪

🍪 Join The Cookie Club

This is the first of many notes from the kitchen. If you like seeing the thinking behind the food, the questions before the answers, and the messy middle, join The Maybelle Cookie Club.