Cookie Man Temptations at David Jones

Call me perverted but sometimes I just walk around the David Jones Food hall in the city without purchasing a thing. Just to drink up the look of all of that fabulous food is sometimes enough for me. Today however, the smell of freshly baked cookies from Cookie Man lures me into a purchase (and let's admit it, after a hard day at work, I don't need much persuading!). I am not entirely taken with their biscuits except for the brandy snaps, I usually prefer Mrs Fields but the smell today is just too tempting.

Speaking straight to my obsession with miniatures is the new temptations mini cream range: mini sized biscuits, sandwiched together with buttercream. They're sort of bite sized if you have a big bite or moreso a 2 bite biscuit. I figure its a good way to get to try lots of different flavours in one go and they're having a sale of 6 for $6.50. The lovely girl behind the counter is kind enough to box these up for me so that they avoid getting smooshed before I have a chance to take a picture of them.

Today's purchases are: Black Forest creams, Ginger creams, Choc chip creams, Caramel creams, Wild Passion creams and Raspberry creams and I can't resist buying one of my favourite cookies, the Brandy snap in a regular sized cream temptation form ($1.60).

The Black Forest cream is a textural delight and gobbled up quickly. Between the biscuit layer, there's soft sweet buttercream, cherry jam and some sort of delicious caramel crunchiness inside which gives it a wonderful three layered texture: soft cream/jam, crumbly biscuit and crunchy inner. The other biscuits don't have this and it really does give it that extra.

The Choc Chip cream is sad to say, a big disappointment. To me, nothing beats a Chips Ahoy (ok obviously a Mrs Fields) but the biscuit isn't a particularly good choc chip cookie, its not chocolatey enough and there's something missing, perhaps vanilla or something else that's small but makes a big difference.

The Ginger cream is my husband's favourite but that does without saying as he loves anything ginger flavoured. Its exactly what you'd imagine if you fused 2 gingersnap cookies with some buttercream. its a little harder than most too and perhaps a bit too hard for the buttercream.

I had forgotten what the caramel cream was until I bit into it. The soft biscuit gave way and I was able to get a bite of biscuit with buttercream without it squirting out the edge. The caramel was a perfect match to the vanilla buttercream. Perfection!

The Wild Passion cream was next-and its definitely cutest as its in the shape of a heart. The biscuit was unfortunately too soggy for the buttercream and whilst it was fairly heady with passionfruit flavour, the soggyness detracted from it a great deal.

The Raspberry cream is decent, a vanilla biscuit with raspberry jam and buttercream. A little too sweet and generic tasting for me. I definitely preferred the caramel which was the same type of biscuit but vanilla and caramel pair perfectly together. A white chocolate or dark chocolate biscuit would have suited this better.

Last and definitely not least is the slightly larger Brandy Snap Cream. Again, the biscuit is a little harder so it doesn't suit the sandwich biscuit theme so well but oh my , I remember why these are my favourite Cookie Man biscuits. So crisp and buttery and slightly caramelly, these are heavenly and to be frank, don't even need the buttercream!

The biscuits that suit this buttercream sandwiching style are the softer ones with a very high butter content like Melting Moments or Viennese creams (or even those Arnotts Shortbread creams) so that when you bite into the biscuit, its crumbles and the buttercream crumbles with it instead of being pushed out to the sides which it does if the biscuit is too hard. The "drier" texture of these high butter biscuits also needs the cream to compliment it.

There are also some Low GI and Gluten free biscuits: