Sugar Savvy

This handsome nugget, in addition to a similar Mint Sandwich Cookie, is featured as a Christmas item on the Emily’s Chocolates website, smartly packaged in a sturdy and festive snowman-adorned tub. But a peanut butter sandwich cookie, if you ask me, defies seasonal pigeonholing. And luckily, when I received them in the mail just last week, they did not taste as though they’d been sitting around since November.

I’ve enjoyed the various Emily’s chocolate-covered nuts and berries that I’ve tasted since first spotting the delicious dark chocolate-covered cranberries at Target over a year ago. Like I said, they get a gold-star on package design, elevating them to host/hostess gift status. I appreciate the representation of the dark chocolate, giving it equal play amongst the milk chocolate selections. Look here for previous Sugar Savvy reviews on other Emily’s products, and here for other items available from the company.

Okay, back to the Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookie: I will say that this might be the fanciest store-bought sandwich cookie I’ve ever eaten. It is a dressed-up hybrid of an Oreo and a Nutter Butter come to think of it: a layer of peanut butter cream rests between two thick chocolate wafers, and the entire affair is then enrobed in a 1/4-inch layer of of rich and good-qualitiy dark chocolate. Each cookie is individually wrapped in heavy-duty plastic, which would ordinarily seem excessive from a natural resources standpoint. In this case, however, I would say that the extra packaging is warranted. Not only does the plastic protect the integrity of the cookie and prevent melting and sticking together, but it also reduces over-indulgence and the stuffing-of-the-cookie-in-the-cakehole with mindless non-intent (you know who you are). In other words, it is the sophisticated city cousin to the Oreo; if an Oreo or a Nutter Butter is a bag of Cheetos, Emily’s PB Sandwich Cookies are parmesan poppyseed straws. Or something like that. No disregard to the Oreo or the Nutter Butter, of course.

My two thoughts for improvement on this cookie:
1) The peanut butter could be saltier. Much saltier.
2) Is hydrogenated fat necessary where non-refrigerated peanut butter is concerned? What about high fructose corn syrup? Why use these? Seriously – if there’s a reason, I want to know. There are way too many other good cookies out there that contain neither of these unwelcome and very unhealthy preservatives.

Other than that, I think these are certainly above average as far as store-bought cookies are concerned – and, for that matter, many bakery and homemade cookies taking up space in the world.

$7.69 for a 10 oz tub containing 10 individually-wrapped cookies.
Can be purchased on the company’s website and various retail outlets.

Top photo courtesy of emilyschocolates.com

Bottom photo courtesy of amazon.com