Maryland Gooeys: Hazelnut

Product name: Maryland Gooeys: Hazelnut
Purchase details: £1.00 for a pack of 10 biscuits (Asda)
Calories: 79 per biscuit
Country of origin: UK

I’ve wanted to try these Maryland Gooeys for ages and all three varieties have been sitting in my stash for a few weeks. Made by Burton’s Biscuit Co, this Hazelnut version came described as ‘crunchy cookie filled with a gooey chocolatey centre’ – sounded good!

The cookies were slightly larger than the standard Maryland cookies and they also had a less bumpy appearance. They looked nicely baked, with the edges and bases being more of a golden brown colour than the centre.

The chocolate chips contributed to 10% of each cookie and they certainly seemed to be widely distributed across each one. However, what I found strange about them was that, despite my eating occasions not taking place on hot days, just picking up a biscuit left melted chocolate from these chips on my fingertips. I actually decided to try a couple on their own and, sure enough, they were incredibly soft in the way I was expecting the filling to be. They also had a slightly unusual taste which almost hinted at orange.

What I was really looking forward to about this product was the unique filling that made up 30% of the cookies. Unfortunately, this was ‘chocolatey’ rather than containing real chocolate but, even so, combined with its hazelnut flavour and gooey description (further emphasised by the attractive font used for the word ‘Gooeys’ on the wrapper), I thought this would taste and feel similar to Nutella. On breaking open a cookie, my thoughts on the texture were confirmed, with a smooth praline-like filling oozing out and looking, what I would call, ‘fit’. However, there was no nutty smell to these cookies and I was gutted that I couldn’t detect even a slight hazelnut flavour either. 

The biscuit itself did have a vague standard cookie smell but, taste-wise, it was pretty bland. That said, I judged it more harshly on my first eating occasion but, for some reason, it had a slightly nicer and more cookie-like flavour the next day. It also wasn’t as crunchy as I’d hoped, but the slightly thicker than expected filling did help distract from this. Since I wasn’t a big fan of the cookies’ texture, I also tried sucking them and, whilst this didn’t help much texturally, it did release a saltiness that wasn’t present when chewing the biscuits.

You’ve probably established by now that Maryland Gooeys: Hazelnut were not what I hoped they’d be. The overall taste was, well...a bit weird, and it was a real shame that the hazelnut flavour was not at all evident. On a positive note, the filling was, texturally, the best part of this product and so the concept was not necessarily a bad one. I’d also say that, due to the filling, it’s possible that not as many chocolate chips were needed, particularly when these were soft rather than hard. However, they did improve the cookies’ appearance.

In conclusion, I was pretty disappointed by this product but, bizarrely, when eating the recommended serving of two biscuits, the second always seemed to taste better than the first! 

Appearance: 7/10
Aroma: 5.5/10
Taste: 6/10
Texture: 6/10
Overall score: 6.13/10