Smash Or Pass? The Internet Is Divided On These Classic Grocery Store Cookies

What's your guilty pleasure? Some would say they don't have any, because they don't feel guilt over anything that brings them joy. This is certainly a healthy, thoughtful attitude, but that doesn't mean we also don't feel pangs of oh-I-really-shouldn't when we watch the latest season of "Love Is Blind," or go to town on a roast beef sandwich from Arby's (which you can make at home using the round primal). So it goes with another famous guilty pleasure: Those frosted sugar cookies you can buy at just about every grocery store in America.

Testimonials to these cookies are all over social media. "These are simultaneously gross and also the best cookies ever made," said one Redditor. "I'm literally a baker and I'm obsessed with these stupid cookies," said another. Others aren't quite so enthusiastic. One post in the r/unpopularopinion subreddit said that "They taste like powdered bread with creamy confectioner sugar on them," while in an interview for Carlmont High School's newspaper, junior Talia Bartelstone said, "They're the most disgusting, awful, revolting cookies I've ever had."

Generally speaking, I didn't eat desserts with frosting on them as a kid — my favorite dessert was plain sugar cookies, because I had the palate of a 19th-century German potato farmer — so I never formed a nostalgic connection to the pink-smeared stuff. And when I finally did try one, I found that it tasted ... well, wrong. "Uncanny" is the word here: From appearance to texture to taste, it's like a dessert that aliens would bake for Earthling captives on its UFO. It looks, feels, and tastes like a dessert, but there is some unbridgeable gap between imitation and the real thing.

In spite of that, I'm still glad these sugar-spackled pieces of drywall exist. Every time I pass by the bakery section of my local supermarket, past the alarmingly cheap rotisserie chickens on display, I see them in their plastic clamshell packages, looking bright and enticing in their own uncanny way. They're like the stock image of the concept of a sugar cookie, and even if I don't actually want to eat them, I'm happy to see them.

If you want to make these cookies at home, perhaps making them a bit tastier, you can always make sweet, decadent sugar cookies yourself just by using vanilla sugar, a common European ingredient. And whether you favor Italian, Swiss, or French buttercream frosting, you can make some and smear it over your next batch of cookies for an upgraded version of the grocery store stuff. If it sounds like that defeats the point of this proudly artificial, ready-made guilty pleasure dessert, well, maybe it does. But it's a fun project if nothing else, and you might even find you prefer your special homemade version to the corn syrup-laden icing pucks from the bakery aisle.