Maryland Mix'ems - toffee popcorn, caramel & candy shells

Today's review is of the awfully familiar looking Maryland Mix'ems, there are two different versions one being a double chocolate chip cookie with raspberry jellies and candy shells and the packet I've got which are chocolate chip cookies with toffee popcorn pieces, caramel and candy shells. 

These have been about for a while, and to be blunt I avoided them as they seemed a bit of a Chips Ahoy copy but we ran out of biscuits and these were on special offer in Morrisons (£1 at the moment) and so I found myself trying one Friday night. 

They're fairly large cookies with nine in a pack and even though they're chock full of other flavours the distinctive Maryland cookie scent is all I could smell opening them up. 

The biscuit itself feels quite hard to touch but it gives an easy chew and is actually quite soft. It's sweet and buttery as normal Maryland cookies are - not an 'artisan', pretentious cookie but a nice enough, tasty choice for your biscuit tin! 

The first flavour that I noticed was the caramel, it's not a flavoured biscuit base there are actual pieces of caramel dotted about. The cookies aren't uniform in additions at all, some have far more popcorn others candy etc, and this particular cookie didn't seem to have many caramel pieces but the ones it did have had a strong flavour that managed to be dominant without drowning out the others. 

The chocolate chips are massive, and tasted to me the same as the ones used in the original cookie - just larger and as always chocolate and caramel are a delicious combination. The crunchy candy pieces are sugar coated chocolate shells - so basically smarties and don't add too much flavour wise alongside the big chocolate chips but do give a lovely crunch when combined with the soft(ish) cookie, chewy caramel and popcorn pieces. 

I can't say I noticed the popcorn pieces being toffee flavoured too much, caramel and toffe are quite similar, so while they do go together well and taste good, maybe they could have used a completely different popcorn flavour if they really wanted to go the crazy/strange mix route. The pieces of popcorn were very chewy and quite strange added in, it wasn't necessarily bad just different. I was picking pieces out of my teeth for a while after though! 

I think I judged these too harshly based on the comparisons to Chips Ahoy, alone they are a perfectly nice, tasty, fairly priced cookie. So for the rating I'll pretend the two Chips Ahoy I reviewed a while ago don't exist and rate it 

7/10 

But I would like to see completely different ingredients than the ones Chips Ahoy are using too. 

Maryland Soft Baked Cookies

It seems Maryland Cookies are upping their game since Chips Ahoy entered the UK market! First (and before Chips Ahoy were released I believe) came Gooeys and now we have Soft Baked. Both packets promise "Because we're baked so soft and scrummy, we may stick together but we're just as yummy!" Each pack contains 8 biscuits and I did have a couple that were stuck together but they were pulled apart easily enough. 

Double Choc Chunk Cookies and Caramel & Choc Chunk Cookies 

I'll start the review with exactly as the packet describes them the first being soft baked cookies containing chocolate chunks, looking at the ingredients the chunks make up 10% of the cookie. The other is Soft baked cookies containing chocolate chunks and caramel pieces, these cookies have 9% chocolate chunks and 5% caramel pieces. 

These are pretty big cookies (please ignore the white dots on the double chocolate cookie, they're crumbs from my shortbread, whoops!) and as promised they're very soft, they feel like when you take freshly baked cookies out of they oven a little bit too early and can't wait for them to cool down! The double chocolate certainly smelt very chocolatey and I could smell caramel faintly once I'd got the cookies out of the pack. I've included two pictures of the double chocolate so you can see they do have quite a few chunks but with flash on the cookie looked a bit white, it didn't in reality though. 

The cookies taste good, the caramel flavour compliments the chocolate well and you really can't go wrong with double chocolate, but the texture was a little off for me. It felt like a freshly baked cookie but it felt weird being cold so I had a brainwave and stuck the second halves in the microwave for 20 seconds. Wow wow wow!! 20 seconds in a microwave and these cookies jumped from a 6 (very tasty but not memorable) to a solid 8! They taste like I'd just taken them from the oven, warm soft cookies with dripping gooey caramel and melted runny chocolate. The cookie itself stayed soft and moist and the chocolate and caramel chunks melted nicely and the flavour intensified if anything. I'll buy these again for sure. 

Rating 8/10