I really like cookies and I really like cinnamon. I often bake my own cookies (using rice flour) or make cinnamon sweets to satisfy those cravings. But you know, sometimes I get tired. Sometimes I would rather not buy ingredients. Sometimes I wish I could just go out and buy a damn cookie.
But I live in Japan, and that's not possible. Japan barely knows what it means to have an allergy, let alone a sensitivity to anything. They occasionally get on this kick of "let's use rice flour!" to promote domestic consumption (since they don't grow wheat), but they still use wheat gluten in those products, or mix the rice flour with wheat flour. Lame.
A friend sent me a box with some goodies in it. Among those goodies was a box of Enjoy Life Soft Baked Snickerdoodle Cookies. I was pretty excited, because I'd seen these on Foreign Buyers Club (a site where you can order largely American goods and have them shipped to you in Japan), but they were only available by the case. I didn't want to order 12 boxes of them, so I had passed on the opportunity to try them and figured I just never would. At least, until I could reach some kind of American shore, which was not in danger of happening anytime soon.
Let's start with the box, shall we? The picture shows some cracked, beautifully brown little cookies. One of them has inexplicably been broken in half (it hasn't been bitten into, so I suppose someone tore it in half and ate one half and just left the other one on the pile for someone else to find later). The box tells us it's "nut and gluten free" but also devoid of wheat, dairy, egg, soy, fish, shellfish (thank god, no shrimp in my cookies), peanuts and tree nuts. And just for the heck of it, it also does not contain casein, potato, sesame, or sulfites. Good to know. Very few people can't not eat these cookies. This is a good thing.
A serving is two cookies, and there are six servings in the box. (They're packaged in twos in a plastic tray in the box.) Each serving has 130 calories and 4.5 grams of fat. There isn't much redeeming content, but they do have 6% of your vitamin A and 2% of your calcium and iron. To be fair, I think Oreos have quite a bit of your iron as well, so this isn't some kind of huge achievement in healthy cookie-ing. Two cookies will also give you 8% of your fiber. I could make a comment about this, but I'll move on to ...
The flavor!
Of course, you want to know how these taste. Well, so, imagine you're at a party and there are chocolate chip cookies and oatmeal cookies. The chocolate chip cookies were homemade by someone's grandmother, but the oatmeal cookies are from a box. You've been DJing the whole time and when you finally get to the cookie table, hoping to try one of these giant, scrumptious chocolate chip cookies, only the oatmeal cookies are left.
Well, you still want a cookie, so you eat it. It's okay. It's not bad. It's a cookie. But it's not the cookie you wanted.
The Enjoy Life Snickerdoodles contain grape and date, and you can tell. I mean, you can actually see what I assume is bits of date in the cookie if you bite into it. So while my first impression on my first bite was, "Cinnamon!" My second was, "RAISIN. I TASTE RAISIN." And it wasn't raisin, but close enough. I would, to be honest, be far more offended if this were a chocolate cookie, as raisins are used in low-cal or low-fat cookies to try to pretend to be chocolate flavor.
The flavor is kind of dark, like an oatmeal cookie. The cookies contain brown sugar, which would contribute to that. When I think of snickerdoodles, I think of a kind of sugar cookie with cinnamon in it. This is more like a cinnamony oatmeal cookie but without the oatmeal. But with the raisin flavor and without the raisins.
Which brings me to the texture. I've seen a lot of complaints about the texture. I just figure when you go gluten free you sacrifice a lot of texture in the name of ... well ... being gluten free. The cookies are soft. In fact, so soft and sticky that each set in the package is like a mated pair, bonded for life. Definitely not dry and crumbly, as gluten, egg, and dairy-free goods will be. But the texture is a bit gritty. Chalk it up to the dates or the flour. But it's really no worse than an oatmeal or whole grain type of cookie.
Besides, beggars can't be choosers. And that's pretty much the summation of my feelings on these cookies. Oh, you could bake your own cookies, but sometimes you just don't want to ( or can't) do that. If your problem is just gluten, there might be a better cookie out there. If you have other allergies or sensitivities, you might be out of luck. This might be your only hope for something like a normal cookie life. So they serve their purpose. Can't say I love them or would crave them desperately, but they are definitely edible.
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