Passionfruit Butter

I am about to prove you wrong.

That was the best photo I could find on Google Images.

I found these cookies when I was on one of those god-forsaken grocery runs we make when we’re desperately hungry. As anyone knows, these types of grocery runs are no good, particularly when at Whole Foods.

ANYWAY. I was roaming the cookie and cracker aisle — and I have always thought it’s just brilliant to have the two together at long last, a salty-sweet marriage with a Shakespearean star-crossedness — when my eyes fell on a box of these cookies. I sighed, wishing it was Girl Scout season (if nostalgia has a flavor, it is of frozen Thin Mints), and grabbed it, hoping that these would be a decent substitute until those annoying uniformed preteens came knocking at my door in an effort to sell me Samoas (be still, my beating heart!).

I tore open the box just as soon as I could; as soon as I got the inkling of Thin Mints planted in my mind, I had one of my acute, severe, utterly relentless kinds of cravings that could last days on end and not be quenched until I got precisely what I wanted. I bit in and was pleased to say the VERY least.

I haven’t done a physical comparison, but I could swear these cookies are thinner and wider than the traditional Girl Scouts cookie, which is a benefit in and of itself. This bliss is magnified by the fact that the reevaluated proportions allow for a higher surface area that is blanketed by a coat of dark creamy fudginess. This raises another difference between these seemingly similar cookies: I find that with the Girl Scouts’ version, the chocolate coating is merely perfunctory, and it’s so halfhearted that it nearly melts into the cookie part of the cookie. In these magnificent Back to Nature Thin Mints, crispy wafer is snuggled underneath melty, velvety, substantial fudge, but the two beings are wholly unto themselves as opposed to mishmashed into one apathetic and insipid unit… which is to say that you can experience each on its own for a split second before they meld together in your mouth as a heavenly entity.

And oh, God, the crunch! THE CRUNCH. Girl Scouts can’t even dream about emulating this. It’s achieved through the inclusion of turbinado sugar, whose raw, molasses-y flavor is mellowed by the dark chocolate and mint, but which lends itself perfectly to a gritty-sugar consistency that’s got a significant bit more vitality than the Girl Scouts version (which, I realize only in hindsight, was ever so slightly redolent of cardboard). Your eating experience is an active experience, a first date, you and the cookie, your teeth chomping deliberately and exuberantly on the cookie that bites back. So you had resigned yourself to a cookie that passively folds and chemically disintegrates seconds after you’ve taken your bite? So you thought that, while Girl Scouts Thin Mints taste yummy and feel nostalgic, the thin brown wafer beneath that luxuriant exterior would always, indisputably, inevitably bow down?

I’m here to tell you that it isn’t so! I’m here to remind you of your dignity and inherent worth as a human and as an eater! Because once you sink your teeth past that glossy chocolate outside — sumptuous, seductive, melting to the touch like your favorite cashmere sweater, pliable to the extent that it will get under your nails if you’re not careful — you’ll find the quintessence of wafer, with a color as mahogany-rich as its outside led you to believe, grainy and crunchy and perfectly whole, whose true mint flavor is woven into the dark fudge, no longer just an afterthought. The aftertaste is faintly savory. Read: dynamism and thought. These are everything you could ever want.