Bailey's Coffee Bar

It's good to be a Bailey on Florida's Sanibel Island, or at least it was back in 1899 when Frank P. Bailey founded his General Store. Even today, it's the island's favorite place for grocery shopping and morning coffee. We tried it by accident. If you're not familiar, it can look like a neglected strip of stores, except there's constant traffic in and out of the store. I wanted to find a swanky coffee shop, but John convinced me to give their Coffee Bar a try. So glad I listened!
     Turns out Bailey's is more Trader Joe's than country store. The bakery is what inspired me to blog about this deceivingly sleepy place. I got two cookies for breakfast. 'Cookies?' You say. The biggest, moistest, cakiest Black and White cookie I have ever seen, and I've had the best you can find in New York. This one beat them all. My other cookie was a chocolate chunk. Also the size of a saucer, gooey, with chocolate mixed in the dough and so many bubbling boulders of milk chocolate, shards of dark chocolate, and semi-sweet chocolate kisses, you could ask, 'Would you like some cookie with all that chocolate?'
    That's just what we ordered. Every cookie, cake, brownie, muffin, scone, and piece of fudge is made fresh daily, and the selection made me feel greedy and hungry and dangerously close to throwing caution to the wind and binge to the edge of a diabetic coma. Fortunately, my temperate husband was there to keep me away from the overgrown eclairs, the stuffed croissants, the apple crisps that looked like huge gnarled blobs of glazed ecstasy, the lemon bars, the cream horns... I'll stop now.

    The coffee was good too. On my first visit, I was greeted by a poster of a Butterbeer frozen latte inspired by my beloved Harry Potter. No need to look further. It was a big cup of sweet butterscotch fun. On my second visit, I had a moccha latte and I must say, love my Starbucks but didn't miss it at all on this fine spring morning.
     Goes to show you can't judge a coffee shop by it's façade.

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