Candy Review: Mint Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Bites

Monday, October 20, 2008 - by Monica

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.

The bites – little balls of milk chocolate covered eggless cookie dough – are uneven in size, ranging from about the size of a Raisinette to that of a Whopper, and are neither perfectly round nor smooth. They have a minty smell – like mint chocolate chip ice cream, or those devilish Girl Scout Thin Mints. Upon first bite, I find the chocolate shell to be thick and soft, making way for the grainy cookie dough. Admittedly, the texture very much mimics that of cookie dough, but I couldn’t help but notice the absence of chocolate chips. Sure, I get that there’s a chocolate coating, which is nice and all, but what’s lacking is textural complexity. I need the crunch of the chip; it’s integral to the chocolate CHIP cookie dough experience.

The mint flavor was good – akin to that of the aforementioned mint-chocolate treats – but I was a little disappointed by this product for two reasons. One, because of the missing chocolate chip crunch. And two, because it’s kind of an oddity. And by that I mean that mint chocolate chip cookies, while a nice-enough sounding idea, aren’t really all that ubiquitous in the world of baked goods. There must be a reason for that. I think it’s because it inherently just doesn’t work all that well.

Fearful of unfairly marring an innocent candy, however, I sought the opinions of two of my cookie-loving roommates, one of whom has been known to go to the store sometime in the 11 PM hour exclusively for refrigerated chocolate chip cookie dough with nary an intention to bake it. So I figured these were reliable tasters. Both their opinions mirrored mine, though: good cookie dough texture, kind of chalky, nice mint flavor, but it just doesn’t add up. In the end, we’d all rather just eat cookie dough.

But wait! I do have two suggestions that might salvage these bites. The first is to freeze them. This just occurred to me, so I haven’t had a chance to test it out, but it might harden the chocolate coating just enough to provide that oh-so-desirable crunch. (Robby, let me know if you try it.) And second, there might be something to the idea of adding these to your next bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream, creating a mint chocolate chip/chocolate chip cookie dough love child that I could imagine working, despite everything I just wrote about why it shouldn’t.

• Taste of Nature Website

Buy Cookie Dough Bites Online:

• at Amazon.com
• at Candy Direct