Trader Joe-Joe's (Ginger) - Trader Joe's: Marlton, NJ
Happy New Year's Eve everyone! I'll be posting a few things later tonight when I get home from work, including this year's foodie collage, so I hope you all have a fun night and stay safe! (Those of you who areshut-insantisocialhomebody's like me, can look forward to some fun foodie posts to ring in the new year.)
I mentioned buying these Joe-Joe's during our last Candyology101 podcast, and Cybele from Candyblog warned me that they were going to be VERY decadent and coated in chocolate, and boy, was she right.
I'm going to break this post up into several reviews, because it was pretty photo-heavy and getting out of control, so for now, I'm going to skip over the packaging. (It's really vibrant and reminds me of Sid and Marty Krofft, but we'll get into that another day.) Today I am going to start off with the Ginger cookie.
Ginger is a flavor I wasn't always so keen on, I used to think it tasted like Pine Sol, or a similar cleaning product, but it really grew on me in 2014. My first intense ginger experience was eating the entire clump of pickled ginger that comes with your sushi, so I have no one to blame for my hatred of ginger but myself. For the record, you're not supposed to take the whole clump and eat it at once. (Although I am fairly certain everyone but me knew that. I was in middle school at the time and I thought I was sooo cool for eating sushi, but I was doing it all wrong.) My little sushi faux pas soured me on ginger for a very long time, but even so, I always loved gingerbread. I wasn't too sure if this cookie was going to be ginger-y, or gingerbread-y, so I guess we'll find out.
The outside is coated in a thick layer of white chocolate, which was then lightly dusted in what appears to be ginger cookie crumbs. (According to the box they are "Ginger cookie sprinkles.") If you ignored the ginger-y coating, this would look just like one of those White Chocolate Fudge covered Oreos.
Upon closer inspection, the cookie smells sickeningly sweet, like white chocolate candy melts, but there is a good amount of spicy ginger aroma to help balance out the intense sweetness.
I took a bite, and Cybele really wasn't kidding. This thing was thickly coated in white chocolate, and there was quite a bit of creme filling. All together, the cookie was intensely sweet, vanilla-y and there was a mild spiced ginger flavoring, but the coating and filling were just too sweet and overpowered the rest of the cookie. I tried separating the components to try them on their own.
The coating: Sweet, and fairly generic as far as white chocolates go, although this one seemed fairly high quality and it melted very nicely in my mouth. The gingery coating bits added a little crunch to the chocolate shell, and they were pretty powerful. Even though they were rather sparse and small, those little crumbs added a lot of ginger flavoring to the outside of this cookie, but the white chocolate does overwhelm it a bit.
The filling: from what I can tell it was very vanilla flavored, it was better than the filling of an Oreo, meaning it was a lot less shortening-y and waxy, but it was intensely sweet. There seemed to be a ginger-y aftertaste, but I think it was only because the icing had been touching the cookie.
The cookie: Okay, I might be blasphemous, but this cookie would be so much better without all the icing and the chocolate. Seriously. I was able to eat the cookie on it's own and it was light, crisp, and it had some great ginger flavoring. It was almost spicy (as is hot spicy), but I liked that!
Combined, the whole thing loses it's ginger-ness due to the overwhelming sugary icing and coating, and when you dunk it in milk, the cookie gets soggy instantly due to it's light crispiness, while the icing and coating stay solid, making it texturally boring and kind of waxy as far as mouth-feel goes.
Was this the best cookie ever? (It's certainly pretty.) No, at least not as-is, but I would love to try some normal, non-filled and non-coated ginger cookies from Trader Joe's. If there anything like the biscuit from this one, I think they'd be absolutely amazing and they might convert ginger-haters.
© Maria Smith http://poison-and-antidote.net
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