Yes-Yes, Virginia, Those Caramel Cookies Existed

It’s supposed to be Girl Scout Cookie season, although I have yet to be ambushed by any of the pint-sized cookie entrepreneurs outside my local grocery store.

When I’m not suffering from empty-wallet syndrome, I usually buy a box of the Samoas® – those toasted coconut-covered delicacies – although sometimes they seem to be called Caramel deLites®.

Was the cookie’s renaming due to some sort of concern of disrespect towards the friendly Samoans? No, the two different names has something to do with which regional bakery produced the cookies, according to this blog.

Anyway, buying a box of these coconut-and-chocolate cookies always reminds me about a similar cookie that my mother used to buy when we were kids. The cookie was called a Yes Yes.

Unfortunately, no one I know has ever heard of them.

I would even describe the box the cookies came in (it had little palm trees on it). But still, nobody remembered them.

I eventually Googled these Yes Yes cookies, and found that there were others – on the chowhound.com website – who fondly remembered them too. Click here to read their comments.

But it wasn’t until recently when I had a free trial subscription to newspapers.com that I found a small graphic of the Yes Yes box. It was part of a grocery store ad in the Sioux Falls, South Dakota Argus Leader in January 1964.

Here’s another rendering of the box (below). This illustration ran as part of a Woolworth’s ad in the October 7, 1964 edition of the Minneapolis Star.

At last - confirmation that my memory was not playing tricks on me (at least this time). 

Anyway, there was yet another cookie out there that was similar to Yes Yes. They were called Yum Yums, and were baked by Sunshine Biscuits.

Here's that box (circa 1970s), courtesy of Pinterest. No palm trees, but the typography is kinda cool.

Neither Yes Yes nor Yum Yum cookies are around today. 

Dutch Maid seems to have gone out of business. (Lil Dutch Maid is a different cookie company.) Sunshine Biscuits was bought out by Keebler, which today is part of Kellogg’s.

But although Yum Yums are not to be found on your grocer’s shelves, Ernie the Keebler Elf must have stashed the recipe in his hollow tree. Today Keebler makes their own version of the cookie.