Ikea cookies
Going to Ikea with my mother turns a simple shopping trip into a full-blown excursion. We stick bottled water in our purses, amble slowly through the showrooms, and take a break for a mini-meal in the Ikea Restaurant. Thus rejuvenated, we forge onward and inspect the zillions of Ikea products that range from cute to clever to weird. I always buy a soft-serve frozen yogurt (the Ikea ones are a weird translucent cream color and taste kinda funny, but they’re only $1, and I consider them part of the Ikea experience) and some sort of Swedish treat. On my latest trip, I picked up two kinds of cookies: Ballerinas and Gilles.
The Ballerinas, as you can see from the wrapper, are “cookies with a chocolate hazelnut cream filling.” The cream filling is sandwiched between a solid round chocolate cookie and a O-shaped vanilla cookie, making the Ballerina quite aesthetically pleasing. I had high hopes for these because I’ve loved Nutella ever since my middle school French teacher introduced me to its deliciousness. And by love Nutella I mean I often stand before the giant jars of Nutella at Costco and daydream about how awesome it would be to eat it out of those ginormous jars by the pawful, like Winnie the Pooh going at a pot of hunny.
Back to the Ballerinas. The filling is fluffier than Nutella, with a consistency more like whipped frosting than peanut butter, but it still retains a strong hazelnut flavor, which was wonderful. I wish the cookies were similarly decadent; they turned out to be rather dull and bland in comparison. Think about the difference between an Oreo cookie and a generic store brand cookie. While it’s possible that too-strong cookies could overpower the Ballerina cream filling, I think there was still plenty of room for more flavor. I wonder if Nabisco has ever considered making an Oreo with a hazelnut filling.
The Gille Double Chocolate Crisps were a decadent delight. Two thin, crisp cookies sandwich a generous portion of rich, yet sweet dark chocolate. The cookies were just sweet enough to compliment the chocolate without overwhelming it, like an extremely mild oatmeal cookie. Clotide on Chocolate and Zucchini posted a plea for a recipe to reproduce these, and it looks like her commenters responded, so you can try to bake these at home and save yourself a trip through Ikea.
If I have time to visit Ikea again, I’d like to try some of those pastry marshmallow things they keep in freezers in the food section. Have any of y’all tried those before?
