I have such an exciting idea for June CTIAT that I kind of blanked the last week of May.

It’s also a busy week with both my mother and my father having birthdays.

In my real life I’ve been trying different versions of cookie butter, because Aldi had some packages of speculous cookies for super sale that I want to make cookie butter out of. An experiment, if you would.

Because that is what cookie butter is. Kind of like peanut butter is made from nuts, cookie butter is made from grinding the crap out of cookies.

I wanted to try different versions of the speculous cookie butter. Never thinking that I was going to be a bear in Goldilocks and the 3 bears.

I bought a jar from Trader Joes while away at the nursing convention in April. Too sweet said my mouth. (daddy bear bed)

I bought another jar from Trader Joes, the crunch version this time, wondering if a texture change would be good. Nope. Too sweet with crunchies in it. (daddy bear bed who has been eating crackers in bed)

The Trader Joes jars were the Trader Joes brand.

I bought a jar from a rather bougie grocery store. This was from lotus Biscoff, the maker of the cookies. Again, way too sweet. I have got to investigate the ingredients. (mama bear bed)

Then I saw a version at the other local grocery store. This is another “store brand”. This one was just right. (baby bear bed)

Not too sweet, not too crunchy.

The only criticism that I have is that the product is almost too smooth. It’s consistency is almost pourable, instead of a semi-solid state.

I’ve made this cookie before with the Trader Joe’s branded cookie butter. The cookies were WAY too sweet and half of them went uneaten.

This time I used the third store jar, and replaced 1 of the cups of oatmeal with unsweetened coconut. And I used dark chocolate cocoa powder.

The resulting cookies were tender and not as break apart-y as the traditionally made cookie with peanut butter and the full 3 cups of oats.

These I will definitely not kick out of the cookie jar.