Between my weakness for novel new cookies and my love for artificial banana flavor, I had no choice but to buy a box of these limited edition Banana Split Creme Oreos when I spied them on a grocery store shelf tonight. Opening the package gave me a heady whiff of faux banana, recalling Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers and Laffy Taffy. There's something so 1980s about artificial banana; it's the sunny, unabashedly fake Valley Girl of the fruit flavoring world, cruising the shopping mall in a yellow spandex tube dress.

The cookies themselves are normal chocolate Oreos, with a canary-yellow banana cream that's softer and slicker than regular Oreo filling. The banana flavor is more subtle than the smell might indicate. I think they'd be pretty good crushed over vanilla ice cream. The Nabisco website says nothing about the Banana Split Creme Oreo, so I have no idea how widely available they are or how long they're here.

Back in January we told you about the disappearance of Hydrox Cookies, loved by many but apparently not enough. But fans of the cream-filled cookies take note: they're coming back!

Kellogg is bringing back the cookies in their original recipe, with one big difference: no more trans fats! The cookies will start showing up on store shelves this summer. It's part of the company's way of saying thank you to the hardcore Hydrox fans who wanted the cookies to make a comeback (it's a limited edition, but I'm sure they'll be back for good, right?).

I'm going to get a bag of them and do a taste test with Oreos and settle this "which cookie is better" question once and for all.

Bread is a miraculous thing. It's delicious, it gives you energy, it softens your cookies, and it can help you de-clump your brown sugar.

Simply put your sugar in a microwavable container (read: NOT plastic) and place a slice of bread on top. Seal the container and pop in the microwave for 15 seconds.

Voila. The moisture from the bread and the resulting steam will make the sugar softer and more pliable, allowing you to work on the clumps (as seen in the highly scientific "cookie osmosis" chart above).

via [lifehacker]

Next week I'm starting a new job that requires that I actually leave my house in order to do the work. It's going to force me to change my routine fairly significantly and one of the things I'm going to have to do is get a whole lot more organized about food. I've never been good about making time to eat breakfast in the past when I've done the 9 to 5 gig and so I've been pondering ways to make it easier to ensure that I eat something in the morning.

One thing I'm planning to do is bake up a batch of Oatmeal Breakfast Cookies (my mother's recipe is after the jump). I could go buy myself a box of breakfast bars, but when you make them yourself, you can control what goes into them, ensuring that they are lower in sugar, fat and chemicals than the ones you buy ready-made.

Okay Slashfooders, now it's your turn. How do you make sure that you eat a fairly healthy breakfast each day?

Are you an Oreo person or a Hydrox person? I guess I should change that to "were" because the Hydrox cookie is no more.

Now, this might not be news to everyone, since it happened in 2003! But Kellogg's was so low-key about it that a lot of people simply didn't realize it (besides hardcore Hydrox fans, of course). The Wall Street Journal investigated and found out that it was discontinued five years ago after the company realized they couldn't compete with Oreos. The interesting thing is that several people still say they see them once in a while, in stores and on airplanes.

I have to admit that I'm an Oreo person, and I think the reason why I never bought Hydrox was because I just thought they were a knockoff and tasted like Oreos. Now I wish they'd come back so I can try them again. Supposedly the cream in the middle was less sweet?

No, this doesn't mean you drop your microwave and delicious cookies suddenly appear.

Mom's Best Recipes, one of my favorite food blogs, has this recipe for Microwave Drop Cookies, which sound great and are super-easy to make, taking only a couple of minutes to make. Seriously, you cook them for two minutes! these might be good if you're looking for a snack at night while you're watching TV or reading and don't want to make them in a regular oven. Full recipe after the jump.

Let's not get all crazy technical here by telling us that a brownie isn't a cookie. We already got all kinds of heat about dictionary definitions, etc when we told the lucky recipients that they were receiving the results of our cookie-baking chaos. "Cookie baking?" they asked? "Cookie?" These are brownies!

Ungrateful little *censored*. We had it in our minds to snatch the batch back and run off with our "brownies."

If we have to get technical about it, let's just say that these Peanut Butter Cream Brownies are peanut butter cream and chocolate fudge "bar cookies" and be done with it. The bottom layer is a standard fudge brownie recipe that uses cocoa powder, but if you have your own favorite recipe, use it, keeping in mind that the brownies bake in a smaller pan. In other words, if your recipe goes into a 9x13 pan, make half of it.

The top layer is a peanut butter and cream cheese mixture, hence the name Peanut Butter Cream. We used crunchy peanut butter, not because we think tiny chopped hard things tainting peanut butter is okay, but because we used all the smooth peanut butter making regular peanut butter cookies.

We're back on Target. Or rather, we're back to looking at Target's in-store brand, Archer Farms, and some of the products they offer.

I mentioned the Chocolate Chip Petite Cookies last week, which were fine, but not worth running off to Target, battling the Soccer Moms in SUVs in the parking lot, and waiting in a confusing doubled-up line for 15 minutes. They're chocolate chip cookies, for goodness' sake!

Key Lime White Chocolate Cookies are the next installment of my Archer Farms Target Finds. The cookies are packaged in the same way as the regular chocolate chip, but everything is green -- in case you couldn't figure out that there is lime somewhere in the cookie.

A chocolate chip cookie is a chocolate chip cookie, so it's never really bad. If there's one in front of me, I'm going to eat it. On the other side, very rarely does a chocolate chip cookie ever "wow" me. Sure some of them might be cuter because they're smaller, or impressive because they're the diameter of a dinner plate. At some point,though, they're all pretty much the same.

However, I recently came across a chocolate chip cookie that actually made me take notice. A friend and I were out at "shopping event" where local food vendors were sponsoring refreshments up and down the street. One of the stores was offering Deluscious Cookies.

The cookies are just slightly smaller than a CD, so they already stand out for size. They're fairly flat, and somewhat flimsy, which means a lot of butter. I took a bite, and after that first bite, I think I finished the whole thing in about 45 seconds. The cookies are lightly chewy, a little sticky for all that sugar, and though you can't tell from the surface, it's overflowing with chocolate chips.

While I only got to try the chocolate chip (the second one I had was also chocolate chip), there are 24 different "flavors" of Deluscious Cookies. I haven't seen these cookies in stores or bakeries, but they are available for order.

At Trader Joe's the other day, I picked up a container of Dark Chocolate Covered Dried Cherries on my way to the checkout. Unlike chocolate-covered raisins, each piece was huge and there was clearly a high chocolate-to-cherry ratio. Chocolate and cherries are a great combination as it is, but Trader Joe's tends to carry some high-quality brands (under their store name), so I didn't hesitate to put them in my cart. My immediate thought was that they would be good in a cookie, so I baked up a batch to share with some friends. I used one of my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipes, which turns out cookies that are just sweet and buttery enough to be dangerously addictive, with a slightly chewy center and crispy edges. The cherries added some extra chew to the basic recipe and the chocolate brought it all together.

When I mentioned that Girl Scout cookie season was starting, there were many comments about Lemon Pastry Cremes, one of the retired cookie flavors that featured a light pastry cookie and a creamy lemon filling. As far as I've heard, the reason that they were discontinued is that they were switched from ABC Bakeries to Little Brownie Bakers, the second bakery that produces the Girl Scouts' cookies, and that Little Brownie Bakers lacks the right kind of equipment to produce them.

The Girl Scouts seems to retire one every few years, if not more often. Off the top of my head, I can think of several past favorites that are now gone.

• Lemon Coolers were light, crisp cookies with a bold flavor and dusted in powdered sugar.
• Double Dutch were chocolate, chocolate chip cookies.
• Ice Berry Piñatas looked vaguely like Danish pastries, with jam at the center of a tender cookie and a drizzle of icing. http://baking.about.com/od/familybaking/a/girlscoutcookie_2.htm
• Animal Treasures were just the same as the current "All Abouts" and "Thanks" cookies, with a butter cookie dipped in chocolate, as were Friendship Circles Cookies.
• Ole Oles were light, round, powdered sugar-covered cookies with vanilla, pecans and coconut.

Biscotti are a type of crispy, Italian cookies that are baked twice. The double baking, which is typically done by baking a log of dough once, slicing it, then baking the newly cut pieces, is what gives the cookies their crunch and gives them an unusually long shelf-life. While a regular chocolate chip cookie can be kept for a few days, biscotti can last for up to a few weeks.

Traditionally, biscotti were flavored with anise, but these days, they come in a wide variety of flavors. This photo shows a fresh batch of Nutella Biscotti, baked by Maya of, She paints the Kitchen. They used cocoa powder for a chocolaty flavor, nutella (of course), chocolate chips and, if you like nuts in your biscotti, chopped hazelnuts can be added as well. The recipe for the biscotti can be found here and they make the perfect complement for a cup of hot coffee, the chocolatiness of the cookie blending beautifully with the coffee as you dunk in each bite to soften it.

It's that time of year again: Girl Scout cookie season. This year all Girl Scout cookies are trans-fat free so you can eat them with slightly less guilt than before.

There are two bakeries that produce Girl Scout Cookies, Little Brownie Bakers and ABC Bakers . Both produce some of the classic cookies, including Thin Mints, Samoas, Trefoils and Tagalongs (a.k.a. Peanut Butter Patties), but each of the bakeries make several cookies that the other does not. Little Brownie Bakers has three original creations this year. Sugar Free Little Brownies are little chewy chocolate squares "packed with chocolate chips" that are diabetic friendly and All-Abouts are all about "Enjoying life as a true Girl Scout" and appear to have a chocolate-flavored coating on one side.

ABC Bakers has Reduced Fat Cartwheels, which are "oatmeal rounds with a cinnamon burst in every bite" and lemon-iced shortbread Lemonades in their lineup this spring, as well as cookies with the odd name Thanks-a-Lot appear to be the same as the All-Abouts from LBB, although they have the words for "thanks" in five different languages written on them.

I'm planning on passing on both the All-Abouts and Thanks-a-Lots, but I'll consider getting a box of Lemonades with my Samoas, Tagalongs and Trefoils this year.

It looks like 3D cookies will be one of the newest trends in cookie making this year. Of course, we know that both cookies and cookie cutters are normally three-dimensional, but these are different because the baked cookies can actually be assembled into free-standing three-dimensional cookie art!

We first saw the concept back in November when we were prepping for holiday cookie making. This newest set of 3D Cookie Cutters includes fun shapes that can be used in any season: a teddy bear, unicorn, airplane, sailboat, dolphin and dinosaur. The cookie cutters are plastic and there are 12 included in the set, although you can only make six different cookie designs (unless you want to try to attach a flipper to your unicorn or legs to your airplane). The finished cookies stand approximately 5-inches tall and a recipe is included, so you have a recipe that won't spread too much and will fit together nicely on your very first try.

Is it too late to make another batch of Christmas cookies this year? Dessert First's Cranberry-Cherry Icebox Ribbons are just gorgeous. The recipe originally came from The All-American Cookie Book, which is a great source for recipes for all occasions and at all levels of difficulty, from dropped cookies, like chocolate chip, to more elaborately shaped ones. These cookies fall in between the two extremes, although they are certain to impress with their looks, as well as with their flavor. The cookies have layers of shortbread-like butter cookie dough sandwiching layers of dried cranberry and cherry preserves. The thing that makes them much easier than they look is that the cookies are icebox cookies, meaning that the dough is assembled and frozen, then the individual cookies are sliced off of a larger log when you are ready to bake. No shaping is necessary and the resulting cookies are still picture-perfect. Different fillings can be substituted for the cranberry/cherry combination, so look for your favorite seasonal jams to complement the cookie.