If you thought the 500th episode of The Simpsons made you feel old, consider this: The Oreo cookie has been around since before TV even existed -- and back then, it was made with lard.
In the 100 years since its invention, Oreo has become the representative cookie of modern American culture. Everyone loves Oreos. (Quiet down, contrarians. We said everyone loves Oreos.)
Oreos are mixed into Dairy Queen Blizzards. They're used to make chocolate-y delicious pie crusts. Weird Al Yankovic wrote a song about Oreos called The White Stuff. Nearly 500 billion of the cookies have been sold since they were introduced in New York City in 1912. They were the single best-selling cookie of the entire 20th century.
In celebration of its flagship cookie's 100th birthday, Nabisco has done something incredibly rare and precious: released a special, limited-edition flavor.
Wait, did I write "rare and precious"? I meant "common and expected." Oreo cookies are notorious for the various flavors and "limited editions" that crowd grocery store shelves near every major and minor holiday (and even some made-up holidays), as if "limited edition" somehow means that you're not just going to eat the cookies as per usual and then pick the little black crumbs out of your teeth like nothing special just happened.
Nevertheless, the new Birthday Cake flavor is on shelves now and -- true to its name -- mostly tastes like Costco birthday cake icing sandwiched between two hard chocolate cookies. It's not terrible, but it's not as good as some of our past favorites.
Who needs Grasshoppers or Thin Mints when you can have all of those cookies' signature flavor -- mint chocolate -- and an Oreo cookie packed inside?
Once again proving that you can't go wrong with any kind of mint and chocolate combination, peppermint or otherwise.
Oreo has a propensity to repackage the same flavors from year to year in an attempt to persuade its audience that this is a different limited edition cookie from last year.
And when that doesn't work, the Oreos will have the "mint" flavor removed entirely and repackaged as "Winter" Oreos!
Continuing that theme, Oreos have also been marketed during other holidays as "seasonal" flavors -- i.e., Winter instead of Christmas -- like these Spring Oreos that are clearly Easter Oreos but shhhhhhh.
Or these Halloween Oreos that are clearly...bright orange. Ugh.
There are even...Summer Oreos? Okay.
