I know it's really way past Christmas season, but well, we were too laden with food during the season that we only had a chance to try this now - Christmas Pudding Cookies by Crabtree & Evelyn. Or Christmas Pudding Biscuits as they're officially labelled... whatever... what looks and tastes like a cookie must be a cookie.
I guess they may have offered this flavour before, but this was my first time trying it. This year, they sold it in this long... or rather tall can, which was a nice bonus, since I can store my posters and any artwork in it... paintbrushes too.
The main attraction of the cookie is the strong flavour of the Christmas spice blend, especially cinnamon, but also nutmeg, clove and fruit peels. There was also a hint of caramel. It really does make it stand above a normal cinnamon or spiced cookie.
As with all Crabtree & Evelyn cookies, these were the crunchy type, not the soft and chewy type. So the crunch was good in a standard way.
What I didn't like, though, was that the dried fruits were too dry and hard, making them difficult to chew. And once I'd bitten down on them a few times to make them more chewy, they would get stuck in my molars! I guess it's inevitable when you're trying to package a shelf-stable product... any moisture in the fruit bits would probably have spoiled the product by either making it grow mold or else make the cookies lose their crunch. As a result, I couldn't really appreciate the flavour of the fruit bits as a result, even though they did still retain some of their tartness and sweetness.
Also, this problem with the fruit bits kinda overshadowed any merit of adding nuts into the cookie... once your teeth get stuck on the fruit pieces, you can't enjoy any crunch from the nuts at all.
Overall, good taste with the spices, but very bad experience in texture with the fruits. Maybe they should have used much smaller bits of fruit instead, so that you don't even have to chew them.
Finally, I thought I wanted to highlight the ingredients list because it's really interesting!
There's a lot of quality ingredients in there - apple, orange peel, lemon peel, cherries, currants, and of course sultanas. The spice mix was also rather comprehensive, with caraway, fennel, ginger and tumeric too... and I was especially intrigued by coriander, which I normally associate with savoury foods rather than baked sweet snacks like cookies.
Also, probably an old misnomer joke, but seeing it on the ingredients amused me once again... "mincemeat" has no meat in it at all! I wonder how the name for that fruit mix came about...
Price-wise, as you know, Crabtree & Evelyn is relatively upmarket, so given a choice I probably wouldn't pay so much for such a large canister of cookies with rock hard fruits. It's an impressive Christmas gift nonetheless... so maybe you can get it for friends whom you wanna impress... but with whom you're not close enough to really enquire about the quality of the contents ahahahaha.
I guess they may have offered this flavour before, but this was my first time trying it. This year, they sold it in this long... or rather tall can, which was a nice bonus, since I can store my posters and any artwork in it... paintbrushes too.
As with all Crabtree & Evelyn cookies, these were the crunchy type, not the soft and chewy type. So the crunch was good in a standard way.
What I didn't like, though, was that the dried fruits were too dry and hard, making them difficult to chew. And once I'd bitten down on them a few times to make them more chewy, they would get stuck in my molars! I guess it's inevitable when you're trying to package a shelf-stable product... any moisture in the fruit bits would probably have spoiled the product by either making it grow mold or else make the cookies lose their crunch. As a result, I couldn't really appreciate the flavour of the fruit bits as a result, even though they did still retain some of their tartness and sweetness.
Also, this problem with the fruit bits kinda overshadowed any merit of adding nuts into the cookie... once your teeth get stuck on the fruit pieces, you can't enjoy any crunch from the nuts at all.
Overall, good taste with the spices, but very bad experience in texture with the fruits. Maybe they should have used much smaller bits of fruit instead, so that you don't even have to chew them.
Finally, I thought I wanted to highlight the ingredients list because it's really interesting!
Also, probably an old misnomer joke, but seeing it on the ingredients amused me once again... "mincemeat" has no meat in it at all! I wonder how the name for that fruit mix came about...
Price-wise, as you know, Crabtree & Evelyn is relatively upmarket, so given a choice I probably wouldn't pay so much for such a large canister of cookies with rock hard fruits. It's an impressive Christmas gift nonetheless... so maybe you can get it for friends whom you wanna impress... but with whom you're not close enough to really enquire about the quality of the contents ahahahaha.
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