It’s time for another taste-test article! This week, I decided to go with a convenient baking food I found at Safeway– Sweet Loren’s Cookie Dough. Loren has a pot of cookie dough as well, but since it looked so similar to the original Pillsbury Christmas Tree Cookies everyone loves, I ended up walking out with the pre-packaged sugar cookie dough. On the package, however, it did say you could bake them or eat them raw, so I tried it both ways.

I was excited to be able to eat something that appeared to be so similar to the real thing, and it looked as easy as the real thing as well. On the company’s website, they promise all-clean ingredients and believe in the “power of clean food.” The website also mentioned flavors like Fudgy Brownie, Chocolate Chunk, and Oatmeal Cranberry. I ended up buying Sugar Cookie so that I would have an easy comparison to something I used to have frequently.

A few things that caught my eye about this brand when I saw it on the shelves is that these products are both gluten and dairy free, AND they were pre-packaged, which is not an easy come-by in stores that aren’t in the same league as MOM’s Organic Market and Whole Foods. While I found these at Safeway, they are also sold online and at Target for similar prices. They also had decent variety, which was exciting. Their cookie dough jars were labeled with flavors such as Birthday Cake and Chocolate Chunk. I was also intrigued by the cute packaging, which was super feminine and looked like it came straight from a bake shop. This was right up my alley!

Something I immediately disliked is that you only get 12 cookies in the whole package, which was not cheap at the grocery store. The package retails for $4.99 at Target, while the Pillsbury Christmas cookies retail for $2.69 at the same store. The Pillsbury kit gives you 20 smaller cookies. Sweet Loren’s gives slightly bigger cookies, but for some reason I wasn’t so excited about only 12 of them.

I did cut a few in half to make, but I ended up with something more like a small Biscoff cookie rather than a Pillsbury. That being said, they cooked relatively quickly and were identical to every other premade cookie dough package I’ve ever used. They had the same texture and the same process of making, so it was easy enough to recreate. I did eat a raw cookie, which was tasty and actually similar to the Pillsbury sugar cookie in texture and overall taste. I would be really intrigued to see if the jar of dough tastes the same– if it does, I might as well just buy the package which is much cheaper ($4.99 vs. $6.39).

After baking the cookies, I let them cool for 10 minutes just as I had the Pillsbury when I made them for my siblings (I baked a huge batch this past weekend!). These were actually so similar in taste, just as a bigger cookie. I missed the fun of having a tree on my cookie, but in all honesty they tasted so similar that I was okay with it in the end.

My verdict? They are a great replacement for regular cookies if you need something different but don’t want to go through the effort of hand-making something and wanting those Pillsbury’s anyway (for those of us who actually cannot have them). I would be way more into these if they had a way to make them smaller in the packaging, but otherwise these get my thumbs up!

Featured Image courtesy of Kam Bezdek