My favorite Hide and Seek

They say all good things in life come in small packages. Well this favorite thing of mine does come in a package. It’s a deliciously chewy, crunchy cookie in a attractive pack and it comes with a funny and catchy name Hide N Seek. Hide N Seek….a game everyone has played for sure, but here my tongue plays this game with the chocolate chips each time I take a bite of Hide n Seek. I take my turn of closing my eyes as the chips hide inside the biscuit and before they can say ‘Ready’, I bite the crisp biscuit and let the chocolate chips melt in the mouth. What distracts me are the chocolate chips hidden in the biscuits.
Hide N Seek is a version of the Chocolate chip cookie. Little chips of chocolate ‘hide’ in the biscuit. With just the right amount of sweetness, these biscuits don’t cloy. It is heavy on the chocolaty flavor, which definitely goes down very well. However, since the taste of cocoa is strong, the sugar lover can be heard complaining that the biscuits are rather bitter. Not true. It’s just very chocolaty, as opposed to sugary sweet. Hide n’ Seek are square shaped biscuits with diagonal ridges and small grooves filled with chocolate chips. Furthermore this chocolate is also blended well with the biscuit preserving the crispiness of the biscuits at the same time. Parle‘s Hide n’ Seek have a different game to play each time that I play it. Here the classic cream from traditional cream biscuits is replaced by solid chocolate chips.

As I grew up, I managed to move beyond Parle-G and Krackjack and the tins of imported “Swiss cookies” regularly bought by my dad for me. In addition to these, there were the biscuits my mother made. She would prepare the dough and then shape them like cookies and bake them in a bakery nearby. These were old fashion bakeries which had a log fire burning and big metal trays where the bread and biscuits were kept to bake.Nowadays there are microwaves to do such sort of things.My mother made whole batches of cookies at one go, what with housefull of cousins and the ever hungry me around. She would fill up a big tin with these biscuits . When any guests would drop by for tea it would be moms cookies to the rescue if there was nothing else.When you had to return an empty plate to the neighbor, empirical practice suggested that you never give it back empty so moms cookies would do the needful again. Dinner is going to take time but feeling hungry?????cookies to the rescue again .If you look at the omnipresent tea or “cutting” stalls that dot the roads of Mumbai, there are some things which are common to all of them. The tea and the dirty glasses aside, another thing would be three or four glass jars. One would be filled with round cookies, one with Toast and one would be slice cakes. These serve as an ideal snack while having tea.

Turning to Hide n’ Seek’….It comes from the house of Parle, a name known for its original products. Parle is always the one to introduce a typical type of biscuits while the other brands follow suit. Parle started as a small scale industry in 1929. It started production of biscuits, which we still enjoy as ‘Parle-G’.Hide & Seek is India's first and only chocolate Chip Cookie, Although the basic difference between a biscuit and cookie is that Cookies are considered to be more Sweet and chewy while biscuits are brittle.Hide & Seek was launched in India in 1998. Although there were certain variants of Hide & Seek like orange flavour, only chocolate flavour survived. Hide & Seek is positioned as a premium snack cookie. The cookie market is estimated to be around 500 crore in the 5000 crore biscuit market. The baseline for Hide & Seek is “Taste itna ki Dil Aa Jaye" meaning your heart will love the taste.

I Started off with Hide n’ Seek’ during my engineering hostel days, carried on after that too and now every once in a while I do give in to its temptations….actually its more then once in a while!!!!! They make for a perfect solution to an after lunch sweet tooth attack. I can’t imagine anything better to do (sleep excluded) other than lying in my bed on a lazy Sunday afternoon reading the newspapers with a packet of hide n seek opened besides…ahhhhhh pure bliss I tell you besides they are filling as well. You can even crumble these cookies on top of your vanilla ice-cream….tastes wonderful. Everyday as I travel to work by train I pass the parle’s vile Parle biscuit factory with all its wonderful smells wafting around in the surrounding atmosphere and I begin my day thinking about the hide and seeks that are baking inside for me ……