enjoy life soft baked double chocolate brownie cookies

I have a backlog of product reviews I've been working on and this morning I made my monthly trip to Whole Foods to stock up on gluten-free cookies and crackers. They had some of my favorites on sale and they had some new things I hadn't tried yet. So now I have a cupboard full of new foods to eat and review.

Today's victim: Soft baked double chocolate brownie cookies from Enjoy Life. Phew, what a name! With all those descriptors, you'd expect the taste to be, well, chocolatey. (More on that in a second.)

Enjoy Life does a great job of package labeling, letting you know exactly what isn't in their products. They pride themselves on allergen-free foods. And that's good. More companies should practice better labeling. These cookies can be eaten by nearly everyone (except those with a chocolate allergy). They are vegan and kosher. They're free of dairy, wheat, peanuts, tree nuts, eggs, soy, fish, shellfish, casein, potato, sesame and sulfites. (You wouldn't expect most of those things to be in a cookie anyway, so there's a little bit of alarmist jargon going on here.)

You're right to be suspicious and wonder what's in them, if they're absent of all that good stuff. There is cocoa and sugar, but not nearly enough of either. The chocolate chips don't taste like chocolate at all. You know how stuff sweetened with fruit juice just doesn't taste the same as stuff sweetened with sugar? These are sweetened with a lot more fruit juice than sugar and that's evident in the taste. And wouldn't you expect double chocolate brownie cookies to be dark brown, like brownies? They are tan. A tan brownie cookie should have been my first red flag. I thought maybe the photography on the box was just not very good.

The texture is decent. Not Chewy Chips Ahoy soft, but softer and chewier than I expected.

On a green note, they are packaged in a cardboard box, a plastic bag, and a plastic tray. And all the cookies fell out of the tray and stuck together anyway, so the tray is evidently useless.

I just didn't find these cookies satisfying. If you grew up eating low-sugar health food stuff and don't know an Oreo from a Keebler Elf, then you might enjoy these cookies. If you're on an extremely limited diet and have few snack food choices, then these might do it for you. But if you are a card-carrying junk food junkie who is newly adapting to the gluten-free diet, pass these by.