Chunks Ahoy! Triple Chocolate

I was scouring the cookie isle in Sobey's last week in search of something interesting for the blog and came across these delicious looking things.Chunks Ahoy! Triple Chocolate contain white, milk, and dark chocolate chunks. They seemed really promising so I decided to buy them and find out. Upon opening them, I was a little disappointed by the lack of chunks compared to what's shown on the packaging.

Despite the seeming lack of chunks, I was consoled by the thought that these cookies would be really exceptional, perhaps even coming close to the glory of President's Choice Peanut butter cookies (see earlier entry), but I was wrong!

When I first bit into one, the immediate flavor was not of chocolate, or cookie dough, instead they just taste like cheap, desiccated coconut, what a let down. Back home in Ireland, and in the UK, cheap biscuits usually taste of coconut, not in a delicious way, just the dull favor of desiccated coconut, I assume it's a byproduct that they use to bulk up their ingredients, I'm not averse to coconut at all, I just hate when it's used as filler. The texture of these cookies was a major let-down too, they're sort of brittle and dry, there is no hint of chewiness to them, they come apart in the mouth like powdery sugar. So yeah, I was basically duped by the nice packaging and the well-known brand name. The packaging and name are decadent and promising but the actual product doesn't live up to the expectations they set. It sounds like I'm judging these really harshly, but they aren't horrible by any means, they're adequate I suppose, other people might enjoy them more than I do, I guess I've just set my cookie standards pretty high.

So in conclusion, I don't recommend these, get President's Choice instead!

Mug Root Beer

Root Beer is pretty strange to most European palates, but being a kid who liked to swallow toothpaste, I really love this stuff. That description might be a little extreme, but every time I drink root beer it feels like I am finally allowed to swallow that toothpaste,  and I enjoy every drop! Throwback-adolescent-wish-fulfillment works for me, nostalgic indulgence if you will.

But to be honest, it's a lot better than toothpaste, it just shares some of the flavor with that old red-colored Sensodyne toothpaste. How else to describe the flavor? Hmm, perhaps butterscotch mixed with cloves and a lot of sugar. This particular brand is really good, one of the better ones I've tried. I think the only Root Beer I would recommend ahead of this one is A & W. Most good Root Beer is caffeine free, you may feel ripped off by that but caffeine was never a traditional ingredient in the stuff. Root Beer has been brewed here in North America for well over a hundred years, it's traditionally made with the root or bark of the Sassafras tree and sometimes comes with very low alcohol content but all of the brands available in stores here are non-alcoholic. It's rare to find Root Beer outside of North America although it is sometimes available in places like Ireland and the UK, but only as a novelty item, it's not sold on a broad scale.

So yeah, don't let my description put you off. If you're from outside North America and you like to import sodas or buy them on e-bay (you'd be surprised what you can find and how cheap it can be), give some Root Beer a try, it's very different to other soft drinks and a truly authentic North American flavor.