Leclerc – Summertime Cookies – Watermelon

I haven’t experienced much of Leclerc, and decided I wanted to choose these colourful summertime cookies as my introduction to them. I’ve seen them around quite a lot but never ended up trying any of them. I figured now is as good a time as any to try some Canadian cookies. Obviously these are inspired by the classic raspberry creme cookies, where you have a sandwich cookie with a little raspberry jelly in the centre. Only this is a watermelon cookie, with watermelon creme, and a lemon centre.

This is one of three summer flavours of fruit creme cookies. Having grown up with fruit cremes, it’s sad to see that for the most part only the classic raspberry flavour vanilla cookie has survived the test of time. That’s why seeing three radical new flavours come out is a pretty big deal for me.

The texture is a pretty crumbly cookie, and paired with the layer of creme on the inside makes for a pretty soft bite. The cookie itself isn’t dry, and along with the creme makes for a standard, but pleasant sandwich cookie. The jelly center is of course, chewy, sticky and reminiscent of a jelly candy that you left on a hot surface. Now it’s all melty and sticks to everything but its still sweet and tasty and you can’t stop yourself.

The cookie, along with the creme are watermelon flavoured, while the jelly is lemon flavoured. Truthfully the the lemon seems to be found all throughout, as I can taste hints of it in the creme as well. What you end up with is something that isn’t just sweet from the watermelon, but has a slight acidic tartness to it that gives it a nice brightness to it. I certainly didn’t think watermelon and lemon could pair well together, but here we are.

These are very obviously trying to evoke the nostalgia of the classic fruit creme cookies. I say they are classic but I’m actually not sure if they are as ubiquitous outside of the frozen North. It’s definitely a staple of Canadian snacking though, and thankfully Leclerc does a good homage to it. The flavours seemed overly gimmicky to me at first but having tried it I can confirm that they not only work, but are quite tasty to boot.

I’m not overly optimistic that I will see these again. Seasonal flavours are a great way to experiment but I don’t know how popular these will be. I hope it does sell well enough to come back because while it is quite gimmicky, it’s also quite tasty.