A preview of cookie week courtesy of Sam's Club

Next week is Holiday/Christmas cookie week.  One of our colleagues manifestly denies she has any baking talent whatsoever but wanted to be involved with the cookie festival as it were. Since during cookie week only self baked cookies are allowed she signed up for the Friday before and came with a holiday cookie assortment courtesy of Sam's Club. As you can see the brand is Artisan Fresh which is their "premium" bakery product line although some people do not associate the word premium with Sam's club.

Something to start off the cookie week!

Artisan Fresh Selection!

A respectable selection well presented for sure!

This was a nice assortment actually and certainly better than a lot of the prepackaged stuff you find at supermarkets.  There were five types  - german chocolate toffee pecan (that's a mouthful), red velvet with white chocolate chips (why is red velvet showing up everywhere all of a sudden), cranberry orange, almond toffee shortbread and wedding cookies.  Although we could mostly gather which is which by looking at them, since we don't know what a wedding cookie is we determined by the process of elimination that it was the powdered sugar coated cookie in the center of the tray. Interestingly the closest thing we could find the resembled them was something called a Mexican Wedding cookie.

What is what?

Uh, duh, do you think this is the red velvet cookie!

Almond toffee shortbread.

Obviously, this is the german chocolate toffee pecan.

Cranberry orange..the cranberries are the giveaway!

Therefore these must be the wedding cookies

The full selection ready for the taste test!

The ingredients and the flavors were somewhat predictable. The german chocolate contained cocoanut like the German chocolate cake, the shortbread was good with the almond toffee, the cranberry orange were shortbread like also. The red velvet cookie was very distinctive.  The best of the bunch was probably the wedding cookie. It was like a lighter version of shortbread with the added touch of nuts and the powdered sugar. All in all if you don't feel like or simply can't bake anything this is not a bad alternative. You just have to get to Sam's Club where according to our colleague has even larger cookie assortment for all sizes of holiday parties.