| Made by President's Choice, this brand is touted as
Canada's best-selling cookie.
President's Choice is a private label of the
Loblaws grocery store chain. These cookies are pretty
well their flagship product, and are also available in
many eastern states and a few other places, such as
Israel and Hong Kong. Currently in Loblaws stores you
can find some salesperson hawking their new PC
MasterCard. The bonus for signing up is a free package
of these cookies.
The package design is replete with oversize chocolate
chips, bold lettering, and a closeup of one of the
cookies with the standard but confidence-inspiring
disclaimer, "Cookie enlarged to show texture". The
packages come in two sizes, 400 grams (roughly 14 ounces,
priced at CDN$2.99), and 700 grams
(CDN$4.99). Every six to eight weeks or so the 400-gram size
will go on sale for CDN$1.99. This is the time to stock
up.
'Decadents', as they are affectionately known, are not
only the tastiest packaged cookie there is, they are the
best packaged food type product there is. Even people who
insist that everything they eat be made from scratch
love them.
Three of the ingredients in these cookies set them apart
from other packaged cookies:
- Chocolate chips. As the packaging would have
you believe, these cookies are full of them. They're the
first item in the list of ingredients, and they infuse the
cookie with a taste sensation of deep, rich chocolaty goodness.
Loblaws also sells these chocolate chips packaged separately, for
baking and the like, and as expected, homemade chocolate
chip cookies baked with them taste better.
- Butter. Some manufacturers of
packaged chocolate chip cookies have the gall to use palm
kernel oil or hydrogenated vegetable oil in their
products, and then doctor them up with buttermilk powder
to give them a pseudobuttery taste. These types of fat products
detract from the cookie's taste but contribute to the
its crisp elastic snap. Real butter gives Decadents their
superior flavor, but Decadents tend to crumble easily.
- Coconut. Not coconut fat, but true
coconut. Now I have to say, I'm not a big fan of coconut. If
these cookies tasted anything like coconut, I wouldn't go
near them. But the food scientists who developed these
cookies were very clever, and only added a soupçon,
if you will, of coconut to the recipe. Far from making the
cookies taste like coconut, it imparts a subtle -- and
indistinct, unless you read the list of ingredients --
depth of flavor, and the tiny flakes add something to
the texture.
There is one caveat, however, if you are considering
buying these cookies: sometimes, and especially when they
are on sale, some baker in the Decadent kitchens will be
preoccupied with something else, or won't have had enough
sleep the night before, and will leave these cookies to bake
for too long, by a minute or so, I suspect. If this happens,
and it seems to about twenty percent of the time, the
cookies will have a different -- and in comparison,
slightly unpleasant -- taste and texture. So there's a bit
of a lottery involved, but as they say, the exception proves the rule. | 
