Every October, all the major marketing firms in the US gather for the next round of pumpkin-related products, promotions and ad campaigns. Pumpkins and pumpkin products fill every grocery store as if every American has an unfulfilled craving for pumpkins for the other 11 months of the year and this is the only time to satisfy that desire for pumpkin. I noticed one such product – the limited edition Pumpkin Spice Oreo cookies – filling up more shelves than it probably needed, and I decided to try it out.

Most people eat Oreos in one of two ways. The first method is to simply bite into the cookie. The second method and the one I typically use is to split the cookie and eat the icing and cookie separately. These two methods of eating sandwich cookies highlight the fact that there are two main parts of a sandwich cookie – the outer cookie and the inner icing layer; each parts has to be analyzed individually in order to properly evaluate an Oreo cookie.

I tried the cookie layer first. The cookie for the Pumpkin Spice Oreo, unlike that of regular Oreos, is white. From the look of it, I thought it would be a vanilla-flavored cookie, but I found the cookie actually has a light pumpkin flavor.

I found the icing to have a fairly similar flavor. I was actually surprised because I expected the icing to have a much stronger flavor than the cookie since it has a bright orange color to suggest dominance over the white cookie layers. However, the pumpkin flavor in icing isn’t much more prominent than the flavor in the cookies. What I did notice in the icing was an overwhelming sugary texture and flavor. I could definitely feel the grittiness of the sugar between my teeth every time I took a bite into the icing.

The sugariness of the icing is present in regular Oreo cookies as well. However, the lack of sweetness in the chocolate cookies in regular Oreos provides a nice complement to the sugary icing. On the other hand, the cookie part of Pumpkin Spice Oreo cookies are also slightly sweet. Although the cookie part isn’t nearly as sweet as the icing, the sweetness of the cookie in Pumpkin Spice Oreos tends to clash with that of the icing and leaves an unappetizing flavor and feel overall.

Pumpkin Spice Oreo cookies are a nice flavor to try, but the cookie and icing parts don’t go well together, so the overall taste isn’t so good. I can see why these Oreos are limited edition; they just aren’t good enough to eat through out the year. In fact, I’m not even sure if I’ll be able to finish the package of Pumpkin Spice Oreos I opened without some help from my sister. She actually likes excessively sugary products.