Name: Chic Choc
Origin: Korea
Found at: Freshia, Tustin
Cost: $2.50
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Labcoats might work to sell cookies in Korea, but as market share has shown, elves who live in trees do much better here.
Tasting Notes:
Delicious and milky. Not as sweet or dry as a Chips Ahoy, but crispier and more crumbly. After one chew, it turns to chocolatey-dough pudding in the mouth. Put this out for the neighborhood kids and they'd never know it contains coconut, cinnamon and sweet potato powder as ingredients (unless they're allergic).
And there's this: each cookie is individually wrapped, which, depending on who you are and what your point of view is, can be good or bad.
If you're an environmentalist, you'd find the extra packaging is unnecessarily wasteful. If you're a parent packing their kid's lunch, you'd think them a timesaver. But if you're a chronic overeater, it's a toss-up. You might consider it good because there's some semblance of portion-control; or you might think it bad because the spent wrappers are damning evidence of your gluttony.
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.