Trust it to San Franciscans to combine two of life’s most widely spoken-about pleasures – cookies and sex – into an appetizingly-smelling, intriguingly-looking, slightly raunchy, I’m-not-sure-if-I-want-to-take-my-grandmother-there cookie store. Appropriately called Hot Cookie, this one-stop cookie shop is located right across from the Castro metro station, and sells some of what may easily be the most deliciously-sounding cookies on the planet: including peanut butter chocolate chip, toffee chocolate chip, snickerdoodle, coconut macadamia nut, chocolate fudge, and oatmeal, walnut and cranberry, to name a few.

However, Hot Cookie goes beyond just the classics, and offers some rather, erm, interesting cookies as well: cookies infamously shaped after certain – ahem – private body parts. My slight discomfort with such matters on a public blog prevents me from outrightly naming the cookies, but well, I’m sure you can use your imagination. One of these somewhat lewd confections is the chocolate covered macaroon, which, as I’ve heard from one Yelp reviewer, is quite scrumptious indeed.

But seeing that I wouldn’t be caught dead in public munching on such a, er, graphically shaped cookie, I decided to go with what, to me, looked like the next best thing: the cocoa cayenne cookie. It sounded yummy – and exotic – enough.

I took a bite. Hm. Okay, well, it’s definitely quite chocolatey. Not as gooey or as soft as I had expected (and hoped for), but that could partly be due to the fact that I had just spent 15 minutes standing out on the sidewalk, with the the freezing SF wind whipping my coat back and forth, taking pictures of the delicious-looking morself first. But not bad, either. Quite good, quite crunchy, quite –

Woah. What the heck was that? Was that…actually…pretty spicy? My throat felt the slightest tingling of something warm. Was that really cayenne pepper in there?

My golly, I guess it was! I know, I know – the cookie was called “cocoa cayenne,” so of course it was actual cayenne pepper in there. But wow! I didn’t expect it to be quite that flavorful. Sure, it was subtle – it wasn’t as if my mouth was on fire or anything – but it provided a really intriguing mix of savory and sweetness.

It seemed to me sort of like a cookie equivalent of Mexican Spiced Hot Cocoa, which blends together hot cocoa mix and chipotle chili pepper to create a chocolatey concoction with a bare minimum “kick” of flavor. Intriguing, indeed. More bites needed to confirm.

Mm. Okay, confirmed: definitely zippy. I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy it. The shop front itself was too small to eat there (it could only fit around two to four people at a time), but I found a couple of nice public tables right outside where I could savor my spicy sweet cookie in bliss.

And I must say, I think I took a good 15 to 20 minutes to enjoy that divine dessert – nothing on the French, who are famously known to savor their petite cup of caffe for two or more hours at a time – but at least a start. A start to eating slow, savoring much, loving every bite, and being fully satisfied to the core.

If you give a blogger a cookie…well, you’ll just have to wait to find out, hmm?