Welcome to #NotAnAd, where we post enthusiastically and without reservation about things we’re obsessed with from the world of food.
To my recollection, the Hershey’s Cookies ‘n’ Creme bar never played a large role in my Halloween haul. But it should have—one can only have so many pieces of milk chocolate filled with caramel before getting sick of the whole affair.
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The likely reason for its scarcity isn’t because it’s not delicious, but rather, because white chocolate can be so polarizing. Like most of the world, I can’t get down with white chocolate most of the time. And that’s OK, because the Cookies ‘n’ Creme Hershey’s bar doesn’t actually taste like white chocolate.
Nor does it, for that matter, taste much like Oreos. It tastes like an Oreo in the same way that Oreo “creme” relates to real cream—less a facsimile and more like an homage.
In any case, I can’t start a Hershey’s Cookies ‘n’ Creme bar and not finish it. While most white chocolate falls victim to cloying sweetness, the Hershey’s Cookies ‘n’ Creme bar heads it off with a truly generous amount of cookie pieces. Seriously, peel back the wrapper, turn it upside down, and you’ll see actual small, round pieces of cookie, with just enough white chocolate to hold it all together (a horror, perhaps, for anyone with trypophobia).
The cookie pieces are just bitter enough—there’s quite a lot of salt, too, with a standard bar containing 4 percent of the recommended daily amount of sodium—with a pleasantly gritty texture that prevents the gummy mouthfeel that sometimes comes with downing a whole chocolate bar. After pounding down messy mouthfuls of Reese’s, think of it like a palate cleanser.
Before bizarre flavors of Oreos became their own food juggernaut over the past decade, Hershey’s—which launched the Cookies ‘n’ Creme bar in 1994—aspired to something similarly referential. Unlike cookies filled with Pop Rocks or cookies with cookies-n-cream-flavored filling (yes, a real Oreo flavor now), it’s become a classic, understated candy bar that doesn’t need your review, or your social media posts.
While peanut butter cups fill themselves with even smaller peanut butter candies and Oreos fill themselves with Oreos, Cookies ‘n’ Creme bars keep their presence constant, but not flashy. People might not talk about them fanatically, but they must be buying them. In its muted tones with a mostly cream-colored label, the bar is always right by the checkout counter, anyway, usually the only white chocolate option amid the milk chocolate mainstays. It’s a candy that knows what it is, and it’s sticking to that.
That is, until the Oreo filled with Hershey’s Cookies ‘n’ Creme pieces comes along.
