Oreo Soft Cookie

Note that the bag was open before I took the picture. I couldn't wait to try them until I had a camera.

I blame the purchase of this mundane review fodder and the expansion of any fat cells firmly on Marvo at The Impulsive Buy. I've gone a very long time ignoring this offering from Nabisco because I figured any Oreo product which was not an original cookie was bound to be sub-par. I've tried a few things here that have been offered as members of the extended Oreo family, but I have not been impressed with the original product's offspring. Marvo mentioned that Oreo Cakesters, which I'd hoped these would resemble, were like Hostess Ding Dongs or cupcakes and I wanted that blast from the past.

The cookies are tiny at 4 cm (1.6 in.) in diameter and you get 8 of them per bag. I paid 168 yen for them at the discount snack shop Okashi no Machioka. Even with the discount, that's pretty expensive for a small number of tiny cookies. Each cookie is about 80 calories, despite being such a tiny morsel.

The soft, dense cookie exterior has a slight bit of the bitter chocolate essence of an original Oreo cookie, but it's more muted. It's lightly sweet and the filling is mostly about texture. It adds a creamy, fatty contrast to the soft, yet slightly dry cookie exterior. Frankly, the outside of the cookie is like a dry Oreo-flavored brownie. This is not a bad thing, but it would be the sort of brownie that is created to have a long shelf life with all that tends to mean - a slight chemical aftertaste, dryness, and moistness that comes mainly from transfats.

I liked these, despite how the aforementioned paragraph may come across. I've read that Japanese Oreos are less sweet than American ones and I'll have to take everyone's word for it because I never ate Oreos in the U.S. and can only recall how they taste here. This truly is a soft cookie version of an Oreo with a slightly less bitter cookie and slightly less dense and sweet filling. It's good for what it is, and not a bad snack to have on hand for a specific kind of craving. They're no Ding Dong or Hostess cupcake, but they're still pretty good.