My mom is a baker. Not like a real, wakes up at 4am and wears a big white hat baker, but she makes sweet vittles in the oven more often than your average bear. And in fact, cookies are her specialty. But despite her arsenal of specialty biscotti and her 20-plus holiday varietals, she’s never really embraced the classic chocolate chip cookie. I mean, she’s made them and, as such, I had occasion to sample raw cookie dough in my earliest years, but my affection for this delicacy didn’t really blossom until junior high, when my school introduced its Market Day program. (If you don’t know, Google it.)

Yep, Market Day. And more importantly, Market Day frozen chocolate chip cookie dough balls. That’s right, only a greased cookie sheet and 14 to 16 minutes separated you from freshly baked chocolate chip cookies – just like Mom’s! (Or better, as the case may be.) And while that certainly revolutionized the after-school snack in my house, my siblings and I quickly discovered that exactly NOTHING separated us from delicious frozen raw cookie dough, any time we could sneak our greasy mitts to the freezer. And thus began the love affair.

So it was with fond memories of sweet, grainy dough and hard chocolate chips melting between my fingers that I ripped into Taste of Nature’s newest incarnation of my childhood treat: Mint Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Bites.

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I have many a fond memory of Baskin-Robbins from childhood: the free birthday cones, the baseball helmet sundaes, the hard, hard scoops that could be shot clear off your sugar cone and onto the lawn with one overzealous lick. Not to mention the choices – oh, the choices! All 31-plus of them! And I reveled in my flavor selection: Rocky Road, Rainbow Sherbet, Cookies ‘N Cream… the world was my hot fudge-covered oyster (notably not one of the aforementioned 31-plus). But I have to admit, in all my ice cream eating moments, never (ever) did I think to myself, “Mmmm, this ice cream is good, but it would be really good if only I could chew it.” So it is with a bit of skepticism that I opened up my box of Baskin-Robbins Soft Candy.

These candies come in two flavors: Mint Chocolate Chip and Very Berry Strawberry, and in both regular and sugar free varieties. They’re quite small – smaller than a Tootsie Roll – and rectangular. And they’re individually wrapped in foil reminiscent of my Viactiv Multi-Vitamin Chew (highly recommended as a vitamin supplement, less so as a sugary treat).

And soft they are. If nothing else, these things deliver in that department. Softer than both a Tootsie Roll and a Starburst chew, it took me a number of squeezes before I finally landed on Play-Doh. That’s about how soft these are, if you can imagine. (The sugar free ones actually were not quite as soft, falling somewhere between Play-Doh and Starburst on the hard/soft continuum.) But this is where the uniformity ends, so here’s how the individual flavors played out for me:

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