“You’ve had chocolate chip cookies, but you’ve never had them like this!” gushes the Duncan Hines website about the company’s Epic Cookie Dough Cookie Kit.

Gosh. Why did it take so long for someone to think of stuffing cookies with “cookie dough flavored filling”—think frosting laced with flour and chocolate chips—plus sprinkles?

Any old chocolate chip cookie has the usual flour, sugar, butter, and chocolate. But Duncan’s kit tosses in palm oil, titanium dioxide, polysorbate 60, cellulose gum, natural and artificial flavors, and caramel color. Yum.

And those sprinkles! What’s a cookie without carcinogenic food dyes that may worsen behavior problems in sensitive kids?

Best of all, the instructions featured on the box with big, eye-catching photos are for “larger cookies”—six cookie sandwiches per box. But most people won’t notice that the numbers on the Nutrition Facts label are for “smaller cookies”—12 cookie sandwiches per box. (Instructions for them appear only in small print, sans photos.)

So you’d have to double those Nutrition Facts to see that each large cookie sandwich packs 540 calories, 54 grams (13 teaspoons) of added sugar, and 12 grams of saturated fat. You might as well eat 10 Chips Ahoy! cookies.

Deceptive? Duncan doesn’t seem to care.

Photo: Duncan Hines.

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