1941: a time of crisis. A time of panic. A time when there was a shortage of All Good Things (flour, butter, sugar, joy). This resulted in a dusty cookie landscape worthy of a B-grade cult horror film. Bakeries left abandoned. Milk glasses untouched. Girl Scout cookies restricted to two boxes per buyer. TWO BOXES.
This all got me thinking: what if this were to happen today? What would I do? How would I survive? Would I be forced to resort to my savage pre-historic instincts? To wrestle, all deranged and googly-eyed, elbowing my way through crowds just to have my pick between Trefoils, Samoas, and Tagalongs???
Struck by a sudden, infinite panic of cookie loss (and without a noble Girl Scout in sight), I sped to my local Target, where I promptly swiped not one but all FOUR new Chips Ahoy! flavors. Basking in my flour/sugar variety, I pulled from the stash the sole cookie that would fill the empty dinosaur in my heart. The dinosaur that craves chocolate and coffee.
A very hungry dinosaur.
Straight from the plastic container, these cookies already promise the quelling of said hunger. A single waft from a freshly opened pack and you enter a wonderland filled with sensory bombardment. Circles! Chips! Dips and dots of chocolate-coffee stuff! Yes, I imagine the smell of these cookies could wipe away the Melancholies from my sad, sad neighbor who never cuts her grass.
But then I tried the dough.
You know that moment in Willy Wonka where Gene Wilder bites his crispy flower cup and sings a sorrowful little ditty? That’s exactly how I felt upon tasting these: the smell of everything I hoped for, now deflated, shuffled in the mix of a poof of very bland dough. It was not brown sugary. Not regular sugary. Not even artificially-sweetened, fake-sugared sugary. Nay, this dough tasted like air. Albeit, slightly soft, soft, chewy, chewy air, but air nonetheless.
Thankfully, there are a few good chips scattered about. The milk chocolate bits are fudgy and milky sweet, adding little pops of hyper-sugary sweetness. Rarer were the mocha chips, which resembled more of a hyper-milked, hotel-room coffee and veered toward overpowering in their Hampton Inn coffee flavor. It was like hoping for a Furi steel blade and getting an off-brand butter knife.
So, yes, I would’ve dug a sharper coffee note and maybe even a crispier, shortbread cookie, but, at the end of the day, these piddly preferences don’t make these morsels any less easy to eat. Indeed, I could eat these on a train. On a plane. On a boat. With a billy goat.
Or as they were destined to be served.
I call this “Untitled Cookie Tower #2.”
While somewhat “meh” on their own, these cookies delivered on their most standard promise: to be chewy, gluten-filled two-bite mocha-chipped mini cakes. I’m not quite sure why the dough demands to be so hum-drum, why there aren’t more chips or darker coffee flavors, or how a cookie inspired by a beverage qualifies it as a Ice Cream Creation, but what’s in a name? At the end of the day, my inner dinosaur is satisfied. Perhaps not frolicking in the daisies, but satisfied. That’ll do, Chips Ahoy, that’ll do.
(Nutrition Facts – 2 cookies – 140 calories, 60 calories from fat, 6 grams of fat, 3.5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 85 milligrams of sodium, 20 grams of carbohydrates, 0 grams of dietary fiber, 12 grams of sugars, and less than 1 gram of protein.)
Item: Chewy Chips Ahoy! Mocha Chunk Ice Cream Creations
Purchased Price: $2.54
Size: 9.5 oz.
Purchased at: Target
Rating: 5 out of 10
Pros: Soft, soft, chewy, chewy. Tasty chocolate-y chips. Pops of coffee-caramel-ish chips. Smell cures the Melancholies. Reason to create “Untitled Cookie Tower #2.”
Cons: Overall feeling is “Meh.” Bland dough. Weak coffee flavor. The Unofficial 1941 Cookie Crisis. Sad neighbors who never cut their grass. Watching Gene Wilder crunch his coffee cup and get all hum-drum. Angry, unfed tyrannosaurus rex of the soul.
