My mother used to make a chocolate mousse cake for the holidays. She hasn’t for years, because it dirties every dish in the kitchen, but I’m feeling ambitious and would like to try to do it myself this year. However, the recipe calls for a bottom crust of sorts to be made out of crushed chocolate cookies. They are thin and round like Nilla Wafers, but they are chocolate rather like the cookies of an Oreo sandwich cookie. I remember that the last time my mother made the mousse it took her about a week to find a grocery store that carried these cookies, and this year I cannot find them at all. (I’m in a different part of the country now - I’m in Texas and she’s in New York.) Mom has been having trouble again, too.
Does anybody know these cookies of which I speak? Are they available anywhere?
The Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafer isn’t the brand we normally used, unless they’ve changed their packaging recently (I remember a pale yellow box with a great deal of cellophone window), but I’m sure they’d suffice. They’d probably taste very Oreoian. I wish I could recall the name of the things.
You’re not thinking of Girl Scout Thin Mints are you? They’re kinda like what you descibed but they’re chocolate coated. I don’t think they’d do too good in a pie crust…
No, these cookies aren’t chocolate as in candy; they’re chocolate-flavored cookies, the way Oreos are. Regular flour-and-sugar cookies made with a bit of cocoa powder in the dough. There are no other flavorings like the mint in the Girl Scout cookies, they’re just chocolate-flavored cookie dough baked into wafer form.
I’ve also seen (actually I have a box) of Oreo Cookie Crumbs.
Check the baking isle of your supermarket. Should make for good
Crust. You will, of course, have to forgo all the yummy filling.
racinchikki, I know the old packaging did have vast quantities of cellophane on it. Though I don’t remember the original color or when it changed this is definitely a more recent box style.
Chocolate Mama’s Cookies. That’s what you want. (Even if you don’t know it.) Little round chocolate wafer cookies with big hunks of suger coating them. Of course I don’t know if you have Mama’s cookies in Texas. (I’m not sure they still have Mama’s cookies here as far as that goes…)
The pre-made pie crusts and the things that are just Oreo crumbs tend to me more pricey, and since I’d need quite a bit and I’d just be crushing the pie crusts up anyway, they’ll be my last resort. I’ll check around again now that I know that those Nabisco things are still manufactured, and if I can’t find them I’ll consider ordering from the website IrreverentTone linked to. Thanks, folks.
Yup, and I have a box in my pantry for cheesecake crusts. When I get home, I’ll look at the brand for you. I recall that some grocery stores have them, and some don’t around here, and even the ones that do are iffy. I buy them when I see them just for that reason.
When I have to substitute, I use crushed shortbread cookies, which are easier to find. Not chocolate, however, but still pretty good.
Unless you’re making a metric ton of pie, it’s not worth the time or effort to buy a box of cookies (and the Nabisco chocolate things are around three bucks plus a box) when a ready-made piecrust costs around a buck or so, maybe a little more and you get the disposable tin out of the deal.
And, yes, the cookies you’re looking for are the Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafers. (This is the only picture I could find; it’s still a yellow box wrapped in cellophane with a cellophane window. I checked Nabisco’s site and couldn’t find it.) If you do want to get these, you get them in the cookie and cracker aisle. They’re usually on the top shelf so you may have to look closely for them. But they do exist.
