Maple is one of my favorite flavors, but let’s be real, when most of us say we like maple we mean a flavor covering some kind of indulgent carbohydrate.  Maple syrup smothering a stack of pancakes or the cavernous crevices of a crispy waffle.  Sickly sweet icing on top of a beautiful fluffy doughnut.  Lusciously whipped frosting inside of a layered walnut cake…you get my drift.  Maple is a sweet vessel we use to coat other sweet things and create straight up deliciousness.  In a move that seems like it should have been done three years ago, Nabisco are finally giving us maple-heads what we want with the Waffles & Syrup Oreo.

Eagerly ripping into the package unleashes a pleasant, but very slight, maple aroma.  The smell is actually much more reminiscent of graham crackers than it is waffles and syrup, but there is some lovely buttery notes floating out.  While I love me some buttery golden graham, I expected more from the nose on a package that has tantalizing drips of runny syrup on it.  

Biting into the cookie as a whole is more of the same, but even less maple-y than I got from inhaling the Oreo perfume.  Much like the smell, the flavor takes me to graham crackers, with just a touch of maple and smidge of golden butteriness but no bread-y waffle notes.  There is some maple there, but it is incredibly subtle with a soft finish that is mostly vanilla and sweet, but tastes deeper than the regular white filling, kind of like the difference between white and brown sugar. 

Isolating the creme on its own also doesn’t give much of a maple vibe.  The creme is two-toned, mostly white with a brown circle in the middle, but there is no discernible flavor difference between the two, and they both taste mostly like slightly less sweet vanilla Oreo creme.  Again, there is a tinge of maple presence on the finish, but if I didn’t read the title on the package I never would have guessed these were supposed to be waffles and syrup.  Interestingly, though, when I eat the side of the wafer with the creme on it, open faced style, I get a little bit of a smoky bacon flavor, and it’s probably the closest to breakfast the cookies have tasted.

These Oreo’s taste good, and they certainly won’t be finding their way into my trashcan, but for something that could have been so delicious they’re ultimately a miss in execution. Have the people at Nabisco never had a maple leaf cookie?  That seems like a good place to start when doing research on a waffle sandwich but I guess they just opted to revert to their already made golden wafer and fill it with a subdued creme. 

To my buds the Waffles & Syrup Oreo are have the reverse effect of the Candy Corn and Peeps variety, which taste just like Golden but sweeter.  When I saw the two-toned creme I thought there would be a different texture like the Filled Cupcake, with a more liquid-y maple center surrounded by buttery flavored creme but…nope.  I never expected these to TRULY taste like warm waffles, but I at least wanted them to taste like a chug of Log Cabin, and really they’re just a maple-kissed vanilla Oreo.

Rating: 7.5/10
Found at: Safeway ($4.29)