Trader Joe's Ginger Snowball Cookies

Prepare ye the annual holiday cookie onslaught!

You know how it is. Every year around this time...cookies cookies cookies. Cookies here. Cookies there. As my five year old would gratuitously add, cookies in your underwear. Well, probably not there, but if you did, who am I to judge? We all need to get through our days somehow.

Cookies cookies cookies...so I didn't really need to buy Trader Joe's Ginger Snowball Cookies...but yet here we are.

There's not much reinventing of the wheel here. If you're thinking these look like fairly typical holidayesque pfeffernüsse, you're on the right track. Soft, crumbly, buttery, lots of excess powdered sugar to dry up your mouth and cough out and make a flurry fall on your sweater...yeah, these check all those marks.

As a redhead myself, the phrase used on the package though kinda makes me blush. "Studded with ginger," it says. I mean...well, I don't know what I mean. But you know what I mean.

What Trader Joe's means by that particular phrase is interspersed throughout the cookies are little bits of candied ginger. These ginger pebbles will either make or break the cookies for you. There's two things about them. First, the flavor is really particularly mild. Ginger can be really over the top or under the radar, and TJ's chose the latter here. I kinda like it, but I want more ginger taste. And second, for the unsuspecting, their presence really interrupts the bite path. It's not quite like biting into a rock, but the rest of the cookie is so soft and crumbly that hitting as hard spot kinda interfered with the whole experience. Instud of these "studs", as it were, I'd prefer the flavor to be amped up and disseminated throughout the dough, maybe like a triple ginger snap reimagined as pfeffernüsse.

So yeah. We have our annual cookie party coming up, and these will likely not be on the tray. It's not out of hate or spite, but well I spent five hours baking yesterday so I'd rather have the fruits of my efforts be on display. But when that's not a possibility, I'd consider buying again for the $3 or so. They're good enough I s'pose.

Bottom line: Trader Joe's Ginger Snowball Cookies: 7 out of 10 Golden Spoons