Welcome to A Pumpkin A Day, our new series highlighting the finest in fake pumpkin flavors! Beginning mid-September and running through whenever grocery stores and cafes stop selling pumpkin flavored seasonal treats, we’ll highlight one pointlessly pumpkin product per day.
Today I might be cheating a tiny bit. These cookies have pumpkin faces and pumpkin colored filling but have no pumpkin flavoring, but these are Halloween cookies and today is Halloween, so I don’t mind. I’m excited to try a spookified version of the classic cookie combo of chocolate with vanilla cream. The packaging is pretty weird which I really appreciate, since I didn’t love the cutesy, punny packages on all the other Trader Joe’s pumpkin products.
The Chocolate cookie is really nice, it’s not very sweet and it tastes very distinctly like the chocolate on a bourbon biscuit which is amazing because I love those. These are basically bourbon biscuits with vanilla filling rather than chocolate which I adore because I always prefer vanilla frosting.
The frosting texture is a little bit odd, like a gummier Oreo cream. It also doesn’t have a very strong flavor. There’s just something slightly off about it’s texture. I wouldn’t recommend eating it separate from the cookie because it’s not that good on it’s own, but if you eat it with the cookie it’s solid.
I like the spooky, weird pumpkin faces, they’re all slightly horrifying in a really fun way. I think the creepiest part about them is the eye shapes. The one on the lower left will probably come to my nightmares.
Like I said earlier, Trader Joe’s packaging finally came through for me (thank you, Joe) because there are no puns or weird references to yoga. There’s a goblin poem but it’s weird enough that I like it. Describing cookies as “pumpkin faces/crunchy orbs of chocolate hue” is almost as good as when Kanye West described McDonald’s McRib as having “artificial meat eyes.” Almost.
All in all, these are super tasty, and I think I prefer the cookie part to Oreo’s because it’s more bitter. These are really sweet but it’s Halloween so that’s how it should be.
Ratings:
Pumpkin essence – 3. They’re shaped like jack-o-lanterns and have orange dyed filling. That is all.
Mouthfeel- 7. The frosting’s a bit weird but overall it’s a super solid cookie.
Diabetes factor – 7. I ate 4 and can feel the sugar in my bloodstream. Maybe that’s just the Halloween air.
Right to exist – 7. These are fun, festive cookies. I approve of their existence.
Feel of fall – 7. Halloween is the ultimate fall day and these are Halloween cookies, therefore they’re the ultimate fall cookie.
