Nice Cup of Milk and a Sit Down, part 1

(Apologies to Nicey and Wifey)

As a public service, this year I bought some newfangled kinds of Girl Scout cookies to report on, along with the usual "Do-si-dos" peanut butter sandwich. (I'm not going to talk about how good these are or you'll want some of mine, but more on these in part 2 of my report.)

Lemon Chalet Cremes: After repeated testing I am sorry to have to conclude that these are nasty. The "creme" is very odd. It tastes like nothing at first and then like lemon extract after a couple of seconds, which is disconcerting. The cookies themselves taste like nothing the whole time, and I am unmoved by the chalet and pine trees that are nicely embossed on them.

These are so bad that I took two out to jog my memory while I wrote this post, and only ate about 2/3 of one. I didn't want to finish the rest. This is very much not my usual approach to cookies.

"All Abouts": these are a plain cookie dipped in chocolate on one side. I hoped from the picture that this was dark chocolate, but instead it's that kind of thing the cookie companies call "fudge," which is neither particularly chocolately nor anything like fudge.

These were mostly inoffensive. I kept wanting to eat another, but I don't think that's because they were good. More that I kept waiting to feel like I'd eaten some chocolate.

Now, these cookies turn out to also need another sort of review, because they contain writing. They're embossed on the non-chocolate side with words embodying Girl Scout virtues, like "courage" and "confidence" and "fun."

It seems to me that some of them should say "out of touch with modern business methods." Because you still can't buy Girl Scout cookies on the Web. I read on their web site that troops aren't even allowed to do this on their own.

So, great. Girls are learning these business skills: having your parents sell things for you at work, and standing at a sales table in front of a grocery store all weekend. As far I can tell they're not even getting the nineteenth-century skill of selling door to door, because I've been working at home a lot over the past few years and no one has ever come to sell me any cookies.

And if they're really afraid that internet predators are going to stalk girls via cookie sales, I say: What better modern skill to teach than how to identify and avoid creepy people on the internet?

OK, I'm just cranky because it was so hard to find the danged cookies. A few more concrete remarks:

One way in which neither of these newfangled cookies is as good as Do-si-dos is the way they're packaged. Do-si-dos are wrapped in two rows, so you don't eat more than half a box at a time. In the other two, all the cookies are wrapped together. But I guess since they're not very good, there's not that much risk of eating the whole box at once.

Finally, it's odd that both contain partially hydrogenated shortening but are listed as having zero trans fat. Seems like someone's playing with the rules for rounding down here.

Well, that was disappointing. I'm going to go have some more Do-si-dos now to recover.