We’ve all been there; you step up to the door, swing it open, and immediately are hit with a waft of cookie-air that changes slightly every week. This week, we were hit with decadent notes of cinnamon, dark chocolate, peanut butter and toffee, as well as fresh notes of pineapple and strawberry. “The Voice” staffers ventured to Crumbl to taste their flavor rotation of the week. Here are our thoughts from least to most favorite.
First up was Crumbl’s “Pineapple Whip” cookie. Lovers of Dole Whip will recall the sweet pineapple taste of the whipped topping, but that’s where the cookie falls short. The combination of the topping and chilled sugar cookie base clashed, inciting a confusing mouthful of textures that failed to enhance the flavor of the overall cookie. Chilling the cookie created a harder exterior that failed to pair nicely with the pineapple topping. Food sharers, beware of the sticky frosting tainting your other sweet treats! One pineapple lover on our staff was able to overlook the faults of this cookie because of the rich flavor of the soft-serve-like topping.
With its deep color and crystalline flakes of sea salt, the Chocolate Sea Salt Toffee looks so rich it’s almost intimidating. While this cookie is certainly abundant in chocolate, our staff found that its appearance and flavor lacked the toffee aspect we were expecting. Even the sea salt content wasn’t up to par. While there was a sprinkling of bits on the top and bottom of the cookie, there were hardly enough to balance the decadence of the chocolate, and we found the treat to be overwhelmingly rich.
True to its name and the store it hails from, the Strawberry Crumb Cake certainly crumbled. The cookie broke into multiple pieces once we dug our forks into it, revealing its warm, white chocolate speckled interior. On top of the cookie was a milky white glaze and bits of strawberry vanilla strudel, which, unfortunately, did very little to advance the strawberry flavor in this Strawberry Crumb Cake. While the cookie’s pleasant flavor and soft texture earned it a moderate ranking in this week’s lineup, it failed to live up to the palate promised, tasting and feeling like a regular sugar cookie.
The Biscoff Cake was highly anticipated among our staff, who anxiously looked forward to reliving the smooth, cookie butter goodness that comes with the widely beloved Biscoff cookie. Upon digging into the cake, which consisted of swirls of cookie butter sandwiched between two layers of cookie-cake, cookie butter frosting, and cookie butter cookie crumbs—say that five times fast—however, we were sorely disappointed. In summary: if you were hoping for a taste of the airport…do not hop on this cookie flight. While the cake was good enough to earn itself a respectable fourth place, it was far below the expectations set by its affiliate cookie. The cake’s spongy texture made it unpleasant levels of moist (almost as unpleasant as the word “moist” itself), and tasted predominantly of cinnamon with very few other flavors to balance it. The frosting was the most Biscoff-esque part of this cookie, but even its silky texture and buttery flavor did little to cut the cinnamon taste of the cake.
The Ultimate Peanut Butter was another cookie that only fancied the palate of one Voice-staffer, who was still un-impressed. The cookie was allegedly “stuffed with peanut butter,” according to the Crumbl website, but we found nothing of the sort filling the cookie. The cookie’s texture mirrored the stickly consistency of peanut butter. Peanut butter opponents will say it was too peanut butter-esque, while lovers will say there was not enough. Not the best cookie, but it gave what it said it would. It’s lack of invoking disappointment is what landed it in our top 3 this week.
It’s certainly clear why Crumbl decided to make the Cookies & Cream Brownie the dessert of the month. With its decadent, cookies and cream filled chocolate base and its silky white chocolate buttercream, this brownie perfectly encapsulates the rich and creamy flavors we all know and love. This brownie is certainly one of our staff favorites now, but we initially got off to a doubtful start. The brownie’s hard exterior makes it a little hard to dig in, but once you break through to its gooey center, you’re golden. The buttercream topping helps to cut the richness of the brownie, making it the quintessential cookies and cream dessert.
Last but never least—ole’ reliable—milk chocolate chip. Crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside, with ooey-gooey milk chocolate chips that spare no sweetness. This was our top cookie of the week, despite its bi-weekly return. What does this say about the overall cookie menu this week? It was an all around disappointment, and not even the novelty of the capricious menu could save it.
