Hershey's Heath Cookies

Last night, I tried Hershey’s “Heath Milk Chocolate Layered Cookies.” These are square-shaped sandwich cookies, with a toffee flavored filling. And they’re not good.

The first thing that I noticed was the strong buttery scent upon opening the package. It was so strong that it reminded me of margarine, which smells like a parody of butter. But when I tasted it, the scent and flavor mingled into butter cream, super sweet butter cream.

Now, I like toffee. It’s not necessarily on my list of favorite flavors, but I do like it. When it is done right it has a butterscotch subtlety—a long, mellow flavor that lingers after it’s consumed. The cookie, on the other hand, tasted like a wedding cake dipped in granulated sugar. It was too sweet. I had just finished a Starbucks Mocha Frappachino, too, so my palate was already desensitized to sweetness. Nothing should be that sugary, with the exception of eating a quarter-cup of plain sugar crystals.

The filling has a crunchiness to it, which I assume is meant to imply little toffee flakes, but, instead, it just reinforces the sugariness, as if the cream is so filled with sugar, some it didn’t dissolve.

The selling point behind these cookies is that they are made with real milk chocolate; a counterpoint, one presumes, against Nabisco Oreos and their dark chocolate wafers, which apparently the American consumer has been loathing for over 100 years. The problem with Hershey’s solution, though, is that I couldn’t taste the cookie. My taste buds were burnt out from the super sweetness, so that the wafer could have tasted like dry cardboard, and I could not appreciate the fine quality of the milk chocolate that they bake into every cookie.

There were two other flavors of these cookies on the shelves. One was a vanilla cream filling, and the other was peanut butter. I doubt I will be trying either one of them.

Posted by Jonathan at 01:16 PM, 23 January 2007 | Comments (2)