The Decadent Chocolate Chip Cookie

President's Choice is a private label of the Loblaws grocery store chain. These cookies are pretty well their flagship product, and are also available in many eastern states and a few other places, such as Israel and Hong Kong. Currently in Loblaws stores you can find some salesperson hawking their new PC MasterCard. The bonus for signing up is a free package of these cookies.

The package design is replete with oversize chocolate chips, bold lettering, and a closeup of one of the cookies with the standard but confidence-inspiring disclaimer, "Cookie enlarged to show texture". The packages come in two sizes, 400 grams (roughly 14 ounces, priced at CDN$2.99), and 700 grams (CDN$4.99). Every six to eight weeks or so the 400-gram size will go on sale for CDN$1.99. This is the time to stock up.

'Decadents', as they are affectionately known, are not only the tastiest packaged cookie there is, they are the best packaged food type product there is. Even people who insist that everything they eat be made from scratch love them.

Three of the ingredients in these cookies set them apart from other packaged cookies:

• Chocolate chips.   As the packaging would have you believe, these cookies are full of them. They're the first item in the list of ingredients, and they infuse the cookie with a taste sensation of deep, rich chocolaty goodness. Loblaws also sells these chocolate chips packaged separately, for baking and the like, and as expected, homemade chocolate chip cookies baked with them taste better.
• Butter.   Some manufacturers of packaged chocolate chip cookies have the gall to use palm kernel oil or hydrogenated vegetable oil in their products, and then doctor them up with buttermilk powder to give them a pseudobuttery taste. These types of fat products detract from the cookie's taste but contribute to the its crisp elastic snap. Real butter gives Decadents their superior flavor, but Decadents tend to crumble easily.
• Coconut.   Not coconut fat, but true coconut. Now I have to say, I'm not a big fan of coconut. If these cookies tasted anything like coconut, I wouldn't go near them. But the food scientists who developed these cookies were very clever, and only added a soupçon, if you will, of coconut to the recipe. Far from making the cookies taste like coconut, it imparts a subtle -- and indistinct, unless you read the list of ingredients -- depth of flavor, and the tiny flakes add something to the texture.

There is one caveat, however, if you are considering buying these cookies: sometimes, and especially when they are on sale, some baker in the Decadent kitchens will be preoccupied with something else, or won't have had enough sleep the night before, and will leave these cookies to bake for too long, by a minute or so, I suspect. If this happens, and it seems to about twenty percent of the time, the cookies will have a different -- and in comparison, slightly unpleasant -- taste and texture. So there's a bit of a lottery involved, but as they say, the exception proves the rule.