S'more or less.

I guess I've been lucky this year, sweets-wise. My wife still loves me. (D'awwww.) Also, I got the Caramel M&M's a few days before they were supposed to be available. Now I've gotten the new Girl Scout cookie, S'mores, even though there has been lots of trouble in the distribution.

Apparently there were huge shortages, and word on the street -- literally, I spoke with a couple of guys in a parking lot about this, Scout's honor -- the local Girl Scouts would be obliged to give you a free box of something else or otherwise do a make-good for people who had paid in advance. I hadn't, so I expected I'd just get nothing. Maybe an apology.

But despite the huge advance orders, paid for or not, the local kid came through and brought me the box I'd ordered. After all, the Girl Scouts are known for their resourcefulness. 

Also for their pinpoint ethnic diversity.

So how are the S'mores cookies?

Weird.

I like them; the lovely, and thoughtful Mrs. Key did not. She said they tasted like a cereal bar. I agreed, but for me that was a plus. Still, she had a point. Good or bad, these sandwich cookies did not really taste like a s'more. How could this be? The box says: "Crunchy graham sandwich cookies with creamy chocolate and marshmallow filling." That's the whole ball o' wax right there. What went wrong?

One side tells you what it is, the other has GS activities. Horse racing, here. 

Camping? Trail blazing? Smurf hunting?

Candid shot of marshmallow and chocolate filling.

The main problem is that the box lied -- the cookies are not graham flavored in any meaningful sense of the term. They taste like shortbread. Now, again, I didn't find that a bad thing, but my wife is a strict constructionist and I respect her views.

The S'mores cookie may be better out west, though. It's common knowledge that Girl Scout cookies differ depending on which bakery is being used to make them -- no, the girls don't all get together and whip them up -- and it's the same with S'mores. I got the one from Little Brownie Bakers; the S'mores from ABC Bakers are a chocolate-covered graham cracker with a presumably marshmallow layer of white over the cracker, says WCNC. That one might be a lot more s'moresey than mine is.

Really, how could a scouting organization not do this right? Scouts and s'mores are all about the camping. It's just three flavors coming together. Is that really hard?

Well, I still think they're okay, so I'm not going to berate them like the Washingtonian did in its review, "Girl Scout S’Mores Are the Worst Thing to Happen to S’Mores." Their main problem is not the lack of grahamness, which didn't even rate a mention, but the lack of marshmallowness: "They have a vegan 'marshmallowy filling,' which is like saying pizza has a vegan 'cheesy topping,' i.e. it’s terrible and no one should eat it unless they have to." I thought it had an acceptable marshmallow taste. Real marshmallow and chocolate cookies are notoriously hard to transport, after all, and a lot of these cookies get sold by girls working at tables in the hot sun. So if they had to cheat on the marshmallow I can understand. But graham?

I suspect we're just getting started into the debacle of the S'more cookie. Too bad. It should have been a total Girl Scout gold award, but it's looking more like a Daisies participation trophy.