Just like the first time, the delight begins with breaking wide the aluminum package encasing these precious nibbles. There's a hit of something familiar, something of home. If I close my eyes, I could picture my late lola at the stove top, turning cocomilk into oil and those brown, nubby bits of deliciousness I so loved as a kid.
The smell is the essence of coconut. The kind of aroma one gets by reducing pure unadulterated coconut cream into coconut oil and latik.
Last week, I saw this cookie pack at the grocery, but I stopped myself from buying one. See, all the stuff I've tried from this brand (DARE) have been fantastic. I even dared to declare one variant as the Best Cookies Ever! But this other variant of what is supposedly the ultimate cookie line, this one's different. It was coconut flavored, and I hesitated because, hell, this is a flavor Dare can easily screw up. I have never tasted coconut biscuits worthy of their label. That and because I am from the Philippines, where the flavor of coconut is so familiar, so ingrained.
Coconut is our country's version of the giving tree--each part is used for something --for firewood, for baskets, for soap, for food. So for a Canadian based company to offer a coconut flavored cookie, well, it's almost blasphemous, something I viewed with suspicion. How can a country where there are no coconuts produce something deliciously coconutty?
But last Monday, on the grocery aisle, these coconut cookies were on sale. The prices were slashed by half! A box of cookies for merely 50 pesos! I could not fight the urge and got myself a box.
Describing the texture which is a lovely in-between state of crumbly, buttery yet chewy, and the pleasure of inhaling the scent of pure coco essence are not enough to do justice to this cookie's beauty.
One bite and the first thing that popped in my mind was, OMG, it's like eating Macapuno in cookie form! I don't know how they distilled the flavor of full-on natural coconut, how they blended it with cream and milk to get that almost macapuno pastillas-like flavor of the creme filling, I just know that these cookies are amazing. Truly, deliriously delicious.
If you ask me now which one I'll choose -- the Maple Creme or the Coconut Creme, I'll get the latter. Because while the Maple Creme is exquisite. It is still sweet. Whereas my Coconut Cremes are a touch shy of being considered sweet as per my tastebuds. Instead of sugar, what dominates is a creamy, coconut flavor.
I could never have imagined myself singing praises for a Coconut Cookie made by a manufacturer in Canada (where there are no coconuts!) but maybe because back then, I have yet to try these Dare Ultimate Cookies.
Now, all I want is to try the other Ultimate Cookies! Only question is, will the Chocolate, Blueberry, or Raspberry flavors of the Dare Ultimate Cookie line ever reach Seoul? :-(
P.S. A confession: the box you're seeing, the one in the photo above. Well, this was not the box I bought last Monday. When I opened and tasted the cookie, the monster in me growled. And I finished the box of eight coconut creme cookies in one sitting. *glutton*
It helped though because now I know that my delirious joy caused by eating this coconut cookies was not a fluke: Last night, I bought two more boxes of these Coconut cookies, opened one and wham! It is still, to my mind, like eating a luscious macapuno pastillas, in cookie form.
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