When I was a lad, around the time I was Jonesing for homemade popcorn balls, I took to building plastic models of the Universal Studios monsters. A company called Aurora was selling the 1/8 scale model kits, which I thought were the bees knees (a phrase that I think was popular around my time, wasn’t it?) I first built The Forgotten Prisoner of Castel Mare, which, truth be told, was not actually featured in any Universal movie. In fact, it wasn’t even related to any recognizable story. It was just an idea from the creative minds at Aurora. But no matter. I thought it was cool: A skeleton shackled to a dungeon wall, with rats and random bones strewn about the floor. What more could a young boy in the 1960s want?
After building that kit, I moved on to the ones that really were featured in Universal’s movies: Frankenstein, Dracula, The Phantom of the Opera, The Mummy. This last one was not my favorite horror character; Boris Karloff as The Mummy didn’t really do anything other than stumble around really slowly (an observation made years ago by Bill Cosby). He just didn’t seem to have the elan of the other monsters. But I built the kit anyway, just to complete the collection.
I mention all this because today I was faced with a choice of several sugar cookie options: A ghost, a jack o-lantern, a pseudo-Frankenstein, or a mummy. I chose the latter for two reasons: (1) it looked whimsical, and (2) it appeared to have more frosting than the other cookies.
So let’s get down to the scoring!
- Packaging. There’s really nothing to this packaging. It’s mainly just clear cellophane, what allows you to see exactly what your buying. From an artistic perspective, this is not impressive. But from from a transparency (ha!) perspective, it’s aces. (I think that was another phrase from my bygone era, no?) The package does acknowledge that it’s made by Deco Cookies (headquartered in the Mexican city of Huixquilucan, which must have a phenomenally high Scrabble value), and highlights the slogan “baking you happy.” I’ll give it 2 points for the transparency, which is welcome in this era of subterfuge and Fake News.
2. Appearance of the Treat. Is this cookie adorable, or what???
I’ll admit I’m a sucker for frosted sugar cookies, with their bright visual appeal and their simple, uncomplicated flavor. This particular cookie was well-executed: the eyes remind me of Cookie Monster, and the way that they peer out through bandages is fun and whimsical. The bandages (or whatever you call a mummy’s wrappings) are cleverly represented with white frosting ribbons. The overall appearance is at once clever and humorous and appetizing. I would be a schmuck to give it anything less than 3 points.
3. Taste. A frosted sugar cookie is a pretty simple confection to create. And when done right, it offers the perfect combination of a slightly chewy, melt-in-your-mouth sugar cookie base and a coating of sweet, satisfying frosting that’s, well, the frosting on the cake, if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor. The folks at Deco Cookies evidently slept through that part of Baking 101. Instead of a soft cookie that yields to your teeth while releasing a fresh-baked taste of sweet vanilla with a hint of salt, this cookie reminded me of Zweiback toast. What’s more, my molars were in definite danger of enamel damage as they worked their way through the plaster-like consistency of this monstrosity (ha!). You can see from the photo below how, when I tried to slice it, the cookie crumbled like a saltine cracker. The dissonance between the expectations raised by this adorable cookie, and the experience of chipping away at it with my incisors, was heart-rending. Zero points.
4. Value. My local grocery store charged me $1.99 for this putative treat. For another quarter or two you could get a truly wonderful, satisfying cookie of at least the same size from your local bakery. I don’t consider this to be a good value. 1 point.
Steve’s Sweetoberfest Score: 6 out of 12 points, which is neither fish nor fowl, so we call it a TREAK.
Chasing Phantoms 