Hello Panda "Cocoa Biscuits with Chocolate Flavoured Filling"

Meiji

This cookie needs come contrast. It needs contrast in flavour, however in texture it's pretty good. The hard cookie shell and the smooth chocolate filling are different enough in texture, so I have no problem with the texture at all. The problem is with the flavour. The difference between flavour of the cookie and the filling is almost identical and could lead to an argument that has been going on for a while in the candy world. Many chocolate aficionados argue what the difference is between cocoa and chocolate.

We all know that chocolate is made of cocoa, for this argument we’re not talking about the technical differences as much as we're talking about the way it's used to describe candy. Chocolate, and in particular milk chocolate is often a creamy treat that can come in solid or liquid form. Cocoa on the other hand is often something in a powder form, except when you’re talking about hot drinks. Taste wise chocolate is often sweeter and/or creamier, while cocoa is often bitter. These contrasting differences is where this treat could have worked, but didn't. The cocoa flavoured biscuit shell is very sweet, which doesn’t match well with how I often see cocoa flavoured treats. The chocolate flavoured filling is also sweet, so what you have is a sweet cocoa (or chocolate) cookie with a sweet chocolate (or cocoa) filling. It's pretty much the same flavour all the way through.

It's not that this is a bad flavour really, it just gets boring fairly quickly. It would have been a really interesting contrast if you had a bitter cocoa cookie exterior and a sweet, creamy chocolate filling. It was an opportunity to try something really unique, but instead it’s just a fairly boring cookie. This and the fact that the dark colour of the dark cocoa cookie makes the printed images of pandas on the outside of each cookie harder to see. I should also mention (how I have in past about Hello Panda cookies) that I'm not really happy with the weird shape of these cookies and how these weird shapes work (or don't work) with the images printed on the outside of each cookie.

This is an OK cookie treat, it could be better with a bit more thought into the chocolate/cocoa flavours. Most importantly the design of these cookies could have been greatly improved with more thought about the images printed on each cookie. I'd eat these cookies again, but I don't know if I'd ever seek them out again.