I Want M(Oreo): Brookie-Oh No!
There’s a beauty in certain kinds of dissonance: the way flaked sea salt heightens the caramel-y depths of a chocolate chip cookie or the pleasure of jumping into a lake you expect to be cold but the water has been warmed enough by the sun to feel comfortable instead. The clash of expectations that can come from an additional element or a surprising twist is something that makes many things go from good to exceptional. However, there is also another kind of dissonance–cognitive cacophony, if you will. I have experienced this only a few times, but each time sets you off kilter in such a way that you don’t know if you will ever recover. It’s the hidden fruit Gusher candy inside a cheese sandwich of feelings. The Brookie-O Oreo is this, but so much more.
You may be thinking to yourself–a Brookie-O Oreo is what has finally gotten her? She’s literally eaten Swedish Oreos, for gosh sake! Well, let me tell you something . . . Swedish Fish Oreos knew what they were: a nightmare of neon and sweet-sour madness. Lovecraftian in their design, yes, but ultimately you knew what you were getting yourself into.
But a Brookie-O Oreo? Sweet little Brookies? The combination of brownies and cookies into one overloaded bar served and beloved at bake sales all over? There’s not a lot to get wrong with a brookie–from its portmanteau naming to the simple combination of chocolate chip cookies plus fudgy brownie. I’m not personally a fan of them because they always seem like too much, but I don’t judge them for their existence.
The Brookie-O, though? This is a kraken in sheep’s clothing. Opening the package, I was struck by a scent that seemed impossible to place — not typical Oreo, not other cookie, not even chemically unnatural like the strawberry creme Oreos, this was as if it both smelled intensely of sweet and also of nothing at all. I stared at the cookies. Simple Oreo chocolate wafers surrounding three layers of creme: the original creme, brownie flavored creme, and the cookie dough creme. I have had and even kind of enjoyed these cremes on their own. Yet, together, they were something . . . else.
Have you ever seen the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers? If you haven’t, it’s a perfect film and you should go watch it. If you have, though, you may remember how the uncanny closeness of a body snatched person is what drives the real horror. How we can believe we know someone completely only to have them prove themselves to be an entirely different person. It’s existential dread at its finest: can we ever really know those we love? Or are we all just the body snatched waiting to show our true faces?
The Brookie-O is this feeling encapsulated into a cookie form. It is sweet and wrong and sometimes a cookie and sometimes a brownie and sometimes something else which waits for us all in the dark.
