Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! This year and every year, I am thankful that calories absolutely do not even exist today so let’s get our day started right with a cookie review! You can all thank me at my funeral, which will begin promptly at 9:00 P.M. tonight in my living room so please don’t be late. But until then, let’s talk about the new Pepperidge Farm Pecan Pie Cookies! (These will be my last words.)
There are few things I love more than pecan pie. You’re well aware of my love for pumpkin, but truth be told? The pecan pie is the star of my Thanksgiving dessert plate… a plate that features at least five different kinds of pie stacked on top of one another. And it’s so damn easy to make! Dump some sugar, syrup, butter, and pecans into a pie crust, and you’re well on your way to eternal bliss… or in my case, immediate death.
Why is it, then, that the pecan pie flavor hasn’t caught on as a fall staple alongside pumpkin spice and caramel apple? Well, we’re beginning to understand why. It seems to be a difficult flavor to capture accurately in junk foods. Pecan Pie M&Ms were largely a miss, Russell’s Stover’s Pecan Pie candy bar made my teeth scream, and please for the love of God do not eat Trader Joe’s Pecan Pie In A Jar straight out of the jar. The fact that the best pecan pie item we’ve had was a Pringle speaks volumes to its lousy success rate. But a pecan pie cookie might work! The cookie could provide that buttery crust element severely lacking in any previous attempt, and today we’ll get to find out thanks to these new Pepperidge Farm Pecan Pie Cookies.
Pepperidge Farm Pecan Pie Cookies are soft baked cookies made with real pecans. I haven’t had much experience with the Dessert Shop line of Pepperidge Farm Cookies outside of their delicious Pumpkin Cheesecake cookies, so my fat fingers are crossed that they might be able to nail this. I think I would have preferred that they had gone the crunchy cookie route because my favorite part of a pecan pie is biting through that decadent topping. But hey – I don’t get paid to make the cookies. I don’t even get paid to eat them… I’m reviewing cookies on my own free will with no tangible benefits at all. The list of cons is enormous, like me. No wonder I’m going to die…
Eating the cookie base of these Pepperidge Farm Pecan Pie cookies alone, the flavor is pretty subtle but in the right direction. It has a buttery, caramelized brown sugar vibe to it with a nutty earthiness and some crunchy pecans here and there. The white chips do nothing, but when you get bits of pecan the flavor really takes off. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough pecans to replicate the experience consistently from bite to bite. All of the flavors of pecan pie are present in these cookies, but I can’t say they optimized the ratios. These remind me a lot of molasses cookies. Though there are 10g of sugar per cookie, it also misses the mark on sweetness for me. Probably because actual pecan pie is just straight sugar.
Somehow, I found these Pepperidge Farm Pecan Pie Cookies to be likable while still falling a little flat. There’s just something missing from the recipe that fails to deliver the pie vibe I hoped for. Couldn’t they have just baked millions of pecan pies, processed them through millions of blenders, and recomposed into millions of cookies? How do you even make food? In an attempt to unlock the remaining pecan pie experience I was hoping for, I tried heating one up in the microwave and adding the appropriate amount of whipped cream.
Warming them was pretty awesome! I recommend you nuke these cookies for 6-8 seconds to get them nice and warm. The toasty, caramelized pecan flavor is really enhanced. But something was still a little off! I think I know exactly what it is.
Better!
How Likely I Am To Put Pecan Pie Into A Blender Today Rating: 6.5 out of 10
How Many Full Bottles of Whipped Cream I Used For This Review Rating: 1 out of 10
Overall Rating: 6.5 out of 10
