Entering a Trader Joe’s is similar to opening your best friend’s pantry at three o’clock in the morning: you’re confused and overwhelmed by the odd food choices in front of you. I’m not sure why the market decides it needs to turn every food into a drink and every drink into a chip, but props to them for being original, even when nobody asked for it. 

I entered the store with low expectations; honestly, it’s a bit of a game for me to find the strangest thing on the shelf, especially one that I would consider buying (I’m the pickiest eater on the planet), so I was excited. 

I was immediately smacked down to the floor by the amount of pumpkin-flavored items in the store. Signs were suspended on ceilings, orange flooded the aisles, and people were stacking every single pumpkin-flavored item they could get their hands on in their carts. I get it, I love fall, too. But what I hate with a passion so strongly I could dedicate novels to is pumpkin. Pumpkin spice. Pumpkin pie. Pumpkin coffee. All of it. Get it away from me. I’m scared. And there are so many other fantastic flavor options for fall! Whatever. Let me move on.

I cruised down each aisle eagerly searching for a new fall item that was not pumpkin; spoiler alert: there was literally nothing. But I was hungry and had an uncommon urge to try something new, so I needed to capitalize on that. Now, I don’t know why, out of everything in the store, I decided to get this, but I did (maybe it was the same kind of freaky, predestined connection Oedipus tried to fight and became a victim to anyway; or maybe that’s dramatic). 

Butter Waffle Cookies. Breakfast is boring enough, I guess, and someone begged the question, “What if waffles were flat and stale? Oh, wait, no. Call it a cookie.”

I saw it, and I was…intrigued? It was a sick little curiosity that already had an idea about what it was going to taste like, but couldn’t live with the consequence of not knowing. So, I shamefully snatched a box like a man who had been asked to grab a box of tampons and quickly checked out.

When I got home, I sat with my three roommates and cracked the box open. You know that phrase, “never judge a book by its cover?” Well, that absolutely does not apply to food. What I see on the box should be what I get. I am not looking for surprises with what is going into my mouth.

The exterior shows a cute little plate of Stroopwaffle-esque cookies, which I thought made enough sense. Sticking with the same checkered design regular waffles have was a clever decision, in my opinion.

Why did I open the box and see Perry the Platypus’s tail?

They were flat, oval, and REEKED of butter. They looked like the Temu version of what the box depicted, and I already knew what direction we were going.

I gave a cookie to my roommate, and she passed it around to the others. The votes are in: this is no waffle, and the butter smell is overwhelming. And not in an enticing, movie-theater way. In a greasy, bottom-of-the-pan, burnt-Southern-dish kind of way. No one wanted to try it, but I was not going to be the captain going down with the ship alone. I grabbed them by the ankles and dragged them down with me, and by that, I mean I begged them to take the first bite and tell me if it was radioactive or not.

Great news: it’s not radioactive.

Bad news: I don’t know what I am eating.

It is the cookie equivalent of a question mark. The shrug emoji. If the word “meh” had a taste, this would be it. Remember that Brittney Broski video of her trying kombucha? That was our faces.

Maybe I’m being too harsh. The cookie wasn’t awful. It was definitely food. It tasted like a shortbread cookie that a waffle coughed on, then waterboarded with butter (please, I cannot stress enough the presence of butter in this cookie; they should have just called it “Butter Cookie,” and the quotation marks are necessary). It’s the kind of snack that you reach for when you just feel like eating something. The cookie is sweet enough to be enjoyable, but you just have to be bored with no other options.

BUT if you have any slight nut allergy, avoid?? The product warns that it may contain nearly every single nut on the planet. Because nothing screams “waffle snack” more than cashews. 

Honestly, the best part about it was the texture, and I don’t say that lightly. To me, one of the top factors in deciding whether a food is good or not is the texture, and these cookies passed that test. The crunch was satisfying, and it dissolved in my mouth. For that reason alone, the brain is tricked into thinking, “Well, it’s not that bad.” Then you take another bite and immediately retract that statement. It’s kind of like if a baggie of Frosted Flakes and a waffle cone were in a hot car through August and they fused in some strange, cell mitosis sort of way.

While I was gaslighting myself into finishing the cookie, however, I was struck with the same kind of brilliance that hit Sir Isaac Newton: what if I dip this bad boy in maple syrup? Syrup is an essential part of waffles, so maybe it would be the elixir that would salvage this question mark of a “cookie.”

It did not.

I didn’t even finish the whole platypus tail. 

It did taste more like a waffle, though.