The Zombie & No-Bake Cookie/Racy D’Lenes Coffee Lounge

Eau Claire’s got a lot of really good local coffee places — honestly, in my opinion, try them all; you’ll like them all. One of the longer-running ones is Racy D’Lenes Coffee Lounge on the other side of Water Street (the coffee place in the same location as The Nucleus). Racy’s has been around before the turn of the millennium, and it screams “coffee shop.” I figured I could get some good baked good dessert action when I recently went there for coffee, and came away with an altered two-fer: a no-bake cookie, and…The Zombie.

The Zombie is one of their “blenders,” and on the board, “Racy’s Favorite” is written in the description. Easy to understand: it’s chocolate and vanilla with the blender base of ice, milk, and cold press coffee. Pondering what baked good to go with the beverage, I asked the barista what to choose. She recommended the good that wasn’t baked: one of the no-bake cookies (at the time of arrival, half-price, so bonus!).

Dipping the cookie — the classic combo of chocolate, peanut butter, and oats — into The Zombie was a wham-bam of flavors, all cool on a warm-ish summer afternoon. Chocolate-on-chocolate is seemingly redundant, but I consider it underrated, especially when combining the solid and liquid forms. Really, there’s no clash with the different ingredient mixtures of the drink and the food.

So, two desserts paired — it’s a lot of dessert, and a lot of good. The main thing at Racy’s is, of course, the coffee, and there are numerous choices. If you stop by, see what’s in the dessert rack and ask what goes best together. Pardon the pun: you’ll want to race back to try it again (sorry, I had to, I’ll be hear all week, etc.).