Ahhh… what Kiwi doesn’t recall Arnott’s iced animals from their childhood? Spotting these on the shelf this week in Countdown my arm shot out and before my brain had registered what was happening they were in the trolley. Who says that women of a certain age aren’t allowed to buy kids’ biscuits!
I smuggled them back to the office only to have the guy in the cubicle next to me eye them up with a hungry look on his face. What is it with kids’ biscuits? They conjure up happy times from childhood.
He asked for a pink pig so I emptied them out to better meet his request. We both were surprised to see that unlike our childhood memories the cookies came in only two colours, orange and yellow. There was not one pink or green iced animal to be seen. Not only that but the cookies only vaguely resembled animals. We were struggling to work out what they were. A careful study revealed only one lion and no elephant.
The blurb on the box says “not actual size” beside the photos of the animals on the side of the box. That is correct but it is close. These are small cookies but they seemed bigger in my 5-year-old hand.
Interestingly there was no shortage of sheep in the box but the cookies remain politically incorrect as no matter how hard I looked, there was not even one black sheep! Okay, enough of the preamble…how did they taste? Were they just how I remembered?
Nope.
My colleague after munching on his orange pig summed it up well. “Painted cardboard served in a painted cardboard box.” Sadly there was no sugar rush and only a very mild sweet flavour.
I give this blast from the past a one out of five cookie rating.