Taste Test: Cookie Monster

Do these cookies rise to the plate, or crumble to the floor?

Real cookies as they exist in the West are few and far between in China, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any suitable equivalents. That’s the way the cookie crumbles. Or is it? In order to find out, we put six varieties of biscuits and cookies commonly found in Chinese convenience stores to the test.
 

Mini Hetao Cakes (RMB 8.5 for 108g)
“It has an oily, burnt glaze on top, like a crème brulee that was beaten by a gang of fake French patisserie fiends.”
“Egg is clearly the number one ingredient, there’s the unmistakably rancid after taste of yolk from a chicken house gone wild on steroids.”
“The texture elicits memories of necking sand on the beach as a kid but looking past the grit, there’s a pleasant buttery nuttiness.”
 

Sweet Chocolate Stuffed Biscuits (RMB 4.5 for 96g)
“Like messed up Nutella smeared between stale biscuits.”
“This tastes like a bunch of stale hazelnuts got crushed to death, sealed forever in Chinese-made chocolate.”
“In a blind taste test the smell of this biscuit reminds me of the swirling chocolate icecream McDonald’s serves, but since I’m not blind and I put it in my mouth I’m almost positive the brown swirl has been siphoned out of the Beijing sewer system.”
 

Soda Stuffed Biscuits (RMB 5.5 for 125g)
“These smell like gym socks and taste like butter that has been left out too long.”
“I love it when my tongue goes all clammy and plastic-like after eating something. It’s kind of like I am protecting myself for future mala meals.”
“I just wonder whether they would actually improve if the butter was yak butter.”
 

Rich Milk Biscuits (RMB 4.6 for 130g)
“Literally the worst thing I have ever eaten in my life. And I had to try all those convenience store burgers!”
“I bet the cows that gave their milk for this gross disaster grew up drinking water from Houhai.”
“Circle of Death took on a whole new meaning. What sorcery compelled someone to mash soap flakes into a circle and flank it with such a generic biscuit?”
 

Sultana Biscuits (RMB 12.50 for 200g)
“You know when it’s rush hour and you’re in Sanlitun and drunk and you have to go to work the next day and there are no taxis? And then, that one empty taxi slows down, sees you’re foreign, and speeds off? Yeah, that’s what this cookie tastes like.”
“I like them, deeply. Simple and elegant.”
“I actually want a second one of these. Maybe it’s just because the others are so terrible.”
 

Choco Cookies (RMB 9.5 for 100g)
“It smells like a wood cabin, complete with the saliva sucking texture of fresh sawdust.”
“It’s like the cousin of chocolate who comes to family parties drunk, the relative you hate the ever living hell out of yet still see showing up in pantries.”
“If offered this cookie I’d hesitate with a maybe, like the same maybe you whisper to yourself when someone asks if you want to stay for just one more drink after happy hour.”

VERDICT
None of the cookies were very recommendable, but if you found yourself starving to death in a barren wasteland with only a Chinese supermarket for sustenance we recommend your least awful sugar rush will come from the Fate & Date brand Choco Cookies. We do not suggest you buy them for your date though, if that’s what you had in mind, or you might have to take fate into your own hands.

Read previous Taste Tests here or catch more stories by this author here.

Email: margauxschreurs@truerun.com
Instagram: s.xuagram
 

Photos: Joey