The Guilty Pleasure: New limited-edition Oreo flavors. Where To Get It: Your favorite grocery store. Price: About $3 a box. What it Really Costs: Can you resist the thought of cookie dough flavor Oreos?
I have to admit, the folks at Nabisco know what they're doing with marketing the century-old Oreo cookie. Over the past few years, they've developed more than a few new flavors for limited-edition seasonal release. Some of these are pleasant why-didn't-they-do-this-sooner flavors, such as lemon crème. Others were memorable for entirely different reasons. I still shudder at the thought of the watermelon-flavored Oreos.
The people in charge of such things have released a pair of new flavors based on other sweet snacks. One is a golden Oreo infused with the flavor of Rice Krispies Treats; since that's a trademark owned by a different company, Oreo gets to call them Marshmallow Crispy Oreos. The second is a little more straightforward, the classic Oreo with cookie dough flavored filling.
How do they taste? I cracked open a couple of boxes to find out.
See also: We Tried Watermelon Oreos So You Don't Have To
The Marshmallow Crispy Oreos are almost hard to distinguish from the regular Golden Oreos. The flavor profile of the regular filling and of marshmallows are both mostly sugar to begin with, so there's nothing in the taste that especially strikes me as a Rice Krispies Treat analogue. A lick of filling on its own is almost off-putting, with notes of distinctly artificial flavoring.
The main difference is in the texture: There are little bits of crispy rice embedded in the filling. These aren't easy to notice when eating the cookies right out of the box. After all, the cookies are crunchy, so the crisp rice gets lost. These are vastly improved by dunking in milk. Once the cookies are soft and yielding, the crisp rice gives a pleasant crackle that I found quite enjoyable.
I'll admit I was quite intrigued by the cookie dough flavor. People already bake Oreos into chocolate chip cookies to make a monster hybrid cookie, so what's not to like about the concept?
When I picked up the box, I was a little nervous to see a little banner on the box that proclaimed "Made with chocolatey chips". Not chocolate chips, chocolatey chips. As in chips that are sort of like chocolate but aren't actually chocolate.
I gave a cookie the twist-and-lick treatment, and thought the filling on its own was, as usual for Oreo, a bit too sweet. It also didn't taste much like cookie dough. Then I had another cookie whole, and realized exactly what they were going for. The cookies act as a stand-in for actual chocolate chips. The whole package together tastes quite similar to honest-to-goodness cookie dough. It's quite a remarkable feat of flavor engineering.
