Junk Food Nation, its Fall here in DC.  How do I know that? Well, it was 88 degrees one day, and 55 the next.  I froze my buttocks off.  But there are other signs: the changing colors of the leaves, the frost that has begun to appear on car windows in the morning, and the offering of Pumpkin spice lattes at Starbucks. Yummy.

Fall is my favorite time of year, and there are so many reasons for this!  For one, so many random holidays to take off work.  Columbus Day, sign me up!  Second, college and pro football season, postseason baseball, NHL and NBA (normally) offseason trade talks, and postseason baseball. I know I said, postseason baseball twice.  It deserves to be mentioned twice.  October might very well be my favorite month of the year. And thirdly, Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday of the year, what with the family, food, and frolic.

The Fall also brings my favorite flavors of all time together in one amazing season.  My Fall four food groups are: gingerbread, maple, spice, and pumpkin. Coming from rural Upstate New York, my Falls were filled with these flavors – it was, after all, maple syrup country and every person on my street was baking a pumpkin pie at one time or another.

I’ll revisit the topic of my Fall four food groups soon, but for now I’ll just say I am a complete SUCKER for spiced sweet things.  In the spirit of that, today I am reviewing Sweetzels Spiced Mini Cremes!

The Money Shot

Sweetzels is a company from Skippack, PA, a town with the population of about 3,500 people.  Wow. There’s more cookies in this box than in the town of Skippack.  Anyways, Sweetzels has been around since 1910, over 100 years ago, where they claim they’ve been making spiced wafer treats from a colonial recipe. Sold from PA, Sweetzels is a regional favorite, and personally, I’ve ONLY seen Sweetzels cookies pop up in my grocery store in the DC Metro area in the Fall.

When I saw that this season Sweetzels was adding a creme filling to their awesome spiced cookies, my jaw dropped. With my love of Oreos, I had to try these.

Um, yikes

Lemme just say one thing about the Sweetzels logo – I love the cookies but this guy looks like some terrifying druid totem from Burning Man. Gives me the heebie jeebies. I swear I saw the box wink at me once.

Splashy splashy

Spiced wafers taste very similar to gingerbread cookies but with more cinnamon and molasses – they’re a little sweeter and lighter in color.  Imagine a snickerdoodle cookie with a little more molasses.

I once had a friend who used to like to dump spice cookies into a bowl, drown them in milk, and eat them like big chunk cereal with a spoon.  The most unhealthy cereal in the world. But, I guess that eliminates the whole effort of dunking cookies into a glass of milk.

You know, I DIDN'T think it could get better

Whoever thought of taking these spiced cookies and putting two of them together with a creme filling is a genius.  Give that man or woman a raise. It’s about damn time! How had we not had these before…like MANY years before, since Oreos have been on the market?  This was a gold mine waiting to happen.

Adding frosting to a cookie is a no-brainer.  Have you ever had animal crackers? Disgusting. Now, have you ever had FROSTED animal crackers? DELECTABLE.

Like a really unhealthy cereal

The pieces were bite sized – that is to say, they looked like I could fit five or six in my mouth comfortably at one time.  Each nickel sized cookie was loaded with creme, and the smell from the box was very pleasant – that spicy Fall smell.

The box was damn heavy too, so you know Sweetzels isn’t skimping on the boxed portions.

Like spicy oatmeal pies...nomnomnom

I couldn’t stop eating these cookies.  They weren’t overly sweet, which was a nice surprise.  Really, one of the main reasons I like the flavors I do in my Fall four food groups is because there’s more to the flavors than just being SWEET.  Here, the addition of the creme to the already tasty spiced cookies just gave the overall flavor a nice roundness.  The cookies themselves were everything you want from a spice cookie – sweet, crumbly, a nice blend of molasses and cinnamon and an almost caramel taste.  The creme-filled cookies crunched satisfyingly in my teeth, and the cookies themselves were very very light.

This is another one of those junk foods that I had to actually pull the box away and walk into the next room to stop eating them.  Good job, Sweetzels. You’ve created a monster in this one.

Sincerely, Junk Food Guy