I associate the "white chocolate" thing with the mid 1980s.  That's when white chocolate first came to my attention, with the white chocolate Nestle Crunch bar.  As you probably already know, white chocolate is more of a byproduct of the chocolate making process than a thing in its own right.  White chocolate is basically cocoa butter without any of the cocoa liquor or chocolate liquor.

According to the strangely bureaucratic Wikipedia article, in order to be called "white chocolate" in America, the item must be at least 20% cocoa butter by weight.  On the other hand, some white chocolate-like products such as Almond Bark may seem like white chocolate to the untrained eye, but they contain no cocoa butter.

Unlike Almond Bark, Hershey's Cookies 'n' Creme does contain cocoa butter.  But it isn't labeled "white chocolate," which leads me to suspect that it may not contain enough cocoa butter to qualify as actual white chocolate.  Thus the use of the word "creme," which at least in America is a catchall term that indicates nothing more than "this is something white."

In case you were wondering.

I know a lot of people hate white chocolate and all its variants, and would happily shoot them on sight.  I understand this point of view, even if I don't share it.  I think white chocolate (or, as in this case, "creme") is a fine enough thing on its own.  I certainly don't mistake it for chocolate, much less think of it as being a fancier kind of chocolate as many people seem to.  I don't seek out white chocolate specifically, but sometimes when I run across it, it sounds appealing.  Such was the case with this bar, which additionally happened to be on sale.

(By the way, it was on sale for fifty cents.  Which makes me feel like an old lady, because I still think of candy bars as being fifty cents, which is what they used to cost when I was a kid.  UPHILL BOTH WAYS.)

Before I unwrapped it, I assumed this would be filled with flecks of crushed Oreos.  "Cookies and creme" usually means "we have crushed Oreos and mixed it into the medium."  I'm most familiar with this in milkshakes and ice cream.

To my surprise I discovered that it is filled with teeny tiny cookies.  They could be mistaken for Oreos, although "Oreo" is a brand name, which does not appear here.  But if you imagine teeny tiny Oreo cookies - just the cookie part - embedded in a brick of something like a solidified version of Oreo filling, you're close.

In fact, this is really sort of an inside-out Oreo cookie than a white chocolate candy bar, despite its outward appearances.  They're going for a "milk and cookies" theme with the graphics on the wrapper, but the "creme" is definitely more like Oreo filling than milk.  (For one thing, milk is rarely this sweet.)

They manage to cram a lot of these teeny tiny cookies into the bar, while still giving it enough spackle creme to fill in nicely.  Overall, this is definitely something I'd pick up again.

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user cjhuang