Gwoon – Kruidnoten Chocolate Mix

Of all the seasons, holiday especially, Christmas is my favourite. Something about the flavours associate with that season make December all the more exciting for me. I figured I’d try some seasonal snacks from another culture this time around.

My understanding is Gwoon is essentially a discount store brand, similar to how we have No Name as a discount private label brand over here in Canada. Kruidnoten are Dutch spiced ginger cookies that are commonly associate with Christmas and Santa Claus in the Netherlands. As such they are often more common to find around the holiday season, similar to how gingerbread becomes a big thing here in the frigid North. As someone who happens to enjoy gingerbread cookies, I figured this would be an interesting snack to try.

While kruidnoten is often enjoyed just as a round, hard little cookie on it’s own, it’s only natural someone decided to coat them in chocolate to see how it would go. This may be a bit of a “run before you walk” situation by trying this modern take on a classic, but chocolate usually makes things better right?

This particular pack has three varieties of chocolate – white, milk and dark. I can picture in my minds eye what a spiced gingerbread cookie would taste like, but how it would pair with a chocolate is something foreign to me so this seemed like a safe choice. If I didn’t like one flavour, I would still have two others to try right?

The sizing of these is interesting – I was half expecting them to be the size of a small shirt button, but these are closer to a larger coin, like a quarter or dollar. The traditional ones are closer to a small palm, so this is an interesting in between.

They smell very strongly of ginger and nutmeg which is a good sign for me. The flavour carries through as well, the chocolate is pretty basic stuff so nothing to write home about. As you would expect, the milk and and white chocolate are on the sweeter side, while the dark is surprisingly bitter and not sweet at all. The reason the milk and white don’t bother me much is because the cookie itself isn’t too sweet and largely just tastes of ginger and nutmeg. Putting the two together balances things out quite well and the flavour isn’t too sweet. The dark chocolate one is actually a little disappointing for that reason, it doesn’t taste much of anything other than slightly bitter ginger. As a snacking cookie where you would do a few in a sitting, the milk and white ones actually perform better.

Texture is what I expected out of a gingerbread style cookie – the kruidnoten itself is dry and crumbly, but paired with the chocolate coating it has a nice overall mouthfeel and texture to it where the chocolate melts in the mouth and helps to offset the dryness and crumbliness of the cookie.

All in all a fairly pleasant experience that I would recommend to others and try again myself. I’m actually not sure how seasonality affects the availability of these, though I could see these being popular all year round. Here’s to hoping.