Hi All!!
Hope everyone’s week is going lovely!! Brrrr, it’s getting so chilly out and I can’t believe Thanksgiving is already next week!
Today I am back with a few food reviews and they are all desserts or sweet treats because I’m a little piggy! Oink, oink. lol. Seriously though, I had reviewed a couple of delightful treats over the past few weeks and I decided to just group them together in one dessert food review post. So let’s dive right into it! This first one is a review of the product features in addition to the taste. The rest are all regular food reviews!
1. Filled Pastry Bag Vanilla Funfetti Frosting
A little backstory first!
A few weeks ago it was my daughter’s birthday and my mom (the ever great baker) was making her a Minnie Mouse cake. I had requested she make chocolate so I decided I would make some vanilla cupcakes to also have at the party because I feel like two desserts are necessary and not everyone likes chocolate cake. So in an effort to please all the party guests I picked up some vanilla cupcake mix and I was about to buy some rainbow chip frosting to go with it, when this new package of fancy frosting caught my eye. It’s a pastry bag already filled with the frosting that has a built in star tip. So basically you can make your cupcakes look semi professionally done without owning any pastry bags and cake tips! I had heard about this a couple of months back, but I had never seen it in store until that day. The price of it was similar to a jar of frosting so I decided to just buy it instead. I believe only Pillsbury makes this, so Funfetti frosting is what I picked up – although you know I think Rainbow Chip is better! 😉
Years ago I took a cake decorating course at Michael’s but I’d forgotten most of what I ever learned, so I wasn’t really sure how to go about using this pastry bag. I knew to push all the frosting down to the tip and squeeze and that’s about it. Haha. Honestly though, I think anyone can use this and it does make your cupcakes look a lot better and at a party presentation is kind of up there on importance factors. So I started just going around each cupcake with a little swirl and then added some rainbow sprinkles to the top and they looked pretty good! Regarding the taste, the frosting tasted exactly like Funfetti frosting out of a jar, so delicious.
However, I was very dismayed when I was only about halfway done frosting my cupcakes and yet I was nearly OUT of frosting! This was only a couple of hours before the party so I quickly felt myself panicking to only have 12 cupcakes frosted. I looked over the frosting box to see if the new scam is that they gave less frosting because they added it to this dumb pastry bag. Nope, it claimed to have the same amount as a jar of frosting. I think part of the problem lies in the fact that some frosting is wasted in the pastry bag as you cannot squeeze out every last drop of frosting but you can pretty much scrape a jar of frosting clean. The other issue (I’m guessing) is that you use more frosting per cupcake doing the swirl effect with the star tip as opposed to just scooping some out of a jar and spreading it across the top of a cupcake. Or at least I did in this case!
Fortunately, I try to always keep a jar of Rainbow Chip frosting in my cupboard (you know for emergencies, such as this!!) and looked quickly and saw that I had a jar. Whew. So I frosted the remaining cupcakes with my jar of frosting. I must admit that they looked awfully sad next to the ones that I did with the star tip.
Although I did like how the frosting with the star tip looked, it’s aggravating because now I know that I will need two packages of the fancy frosting to make 24 cupcakes. The good news is that I rarely bake cupcakes because I feel that I’ve never been able to get the baking time just right on them and they always seem a little overbaked. However, the best part of cupcakes is that you can hide all of your baking mistakes with frosting which is exactly what I did in this case.And guess what? A few people commented on how pretty they looked and said they tasted good! I certainly wasn’t too proud of them but people love frosting! So my lesson is: frosting can fix most problems, especially fancily applied frosting and I would definitely use this product again for party cupcakes.
2. Betty Crocker Delights Peanut Butter Cookie Brownie Bar Mix
I was at the grocery store recently and I often peruse the baking aisle and look over all of the boxed mixes to see if anything new is out that I want to make. A Betty Crocker box caught my eye because it said Peanut Butter Cookie Brownie Bars Mix! I have tried regular chocolate chip cookie brownie bar mixes and I didn’t really like them. I don’t know what I didn’t like – I just didn’t think that the two really needed to be mashed together for a tasty dessert. However, I thought the peanut cookie mixed with the chocolate brownie could be a marriage made in heaven so I purchased it.
I often purchase brownie mixes, but I don’t buy cookie mixes because they are usually dry and it’s difficult to mix the dough together. I typically end up just rolling up my sleeves and mixing the dough with my hands because a spoon just can’t do what your hands can! Which was exactly the case with this mix as well. First, I made the brownie mix and added it to my baking pan. Then I mixed the cookie dough portion separately and added to the brownie mixture. I used my hands to form a ball of peanut butter cookie dough and then used my cookie scoop to drop spoonfuls of the dough onto the brownie batter. The cookie scoop was really handy in this situation! I thought about trying to swirl the dough a little more with a knife to create a prettier pattern in the pan before baking, but it was kind of tough to do and I didn’t want to mess too much with it so I just threw it in the oven and set the timer. My oven cooks really fast so the box said 34-39 minutes, but I set my timer for 29 and they were perfectly done by that time.
I let them cool for about 20 minutes and then dove in and hold the phone – do not walk to the store, RUN AND BUY THIS. They were SO GOOD. I really can’t recall the last time that I thought a boxed mix was so delightful. It helped that I got the timing just right so the bars were soft and slightly gooey on the inside. I actually had to give away about half of the pan of these because I couldn’t stop eating them. They were that good! So if you are going to a party or want to show someone that you really, really like them and you know they like sweets and peanut butter then make them these bars!! You and them will not be disappointed, I promise!
3. Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch Cereal
I think you can probably tell by my few food blog posts that I’m sort of a junk food junkie and definitely a dessert person. I follow a few food blogs that are always reviewing brand new products and one that I read was going crazy because Cinnamon Toast Crunch was rereleasing a holiday cereal from a few years back called Sugar Cookie Toast Crunch Cereal. This particular blog, Junk Banter, was really raving about this cereal. They raved about it so much that I decided I really needed to try this. I like CTC as much as the next person and sugar cookies definitely make me happy, so I figured I would really enjoy this.
I finally found it at Target last week and happily went home to dive in. I started munching on it dry right away and honestly…felt a little let down. It’s good, but I really wouldn’t hype it up. (Junk Banter proclaimed it to be the best cereal they have ever eaten!) What they’ve done is replace the cinnamon sugar of CTC with regular sugar and maybe a touch of vanilla. I feel like I would like this more, except the flavor is kind of weak. Adding milk to it did help to enhance the flavors and make it more enjoyable, but it really just tastes kind of sweet and I was left feeling like it needed something else. I think I would have appreciated a stronger vanilla taste. If you’re a big cereal person, then I think it’s definitely worth trying, especially if you are into sugary cereals. I’m sure I’ll finish this box, but I don’t think I will buy another this holiday season.
4. Dunkin’ Donuts Bottled Iced Coffee – Cookies & Cream Flavor
First, what do we think of Dunkin’ Donuts changing their name to just Dunkin’? I was kind of stunned that they really changed their name – I even asked an employee if it was a really true! Personally, I feel like it’s a superfluous change. In any event, they they have a lot of labeling to update, including their new bottled iced coffee. This caught my eye one day in the beverage aisle at my local grocery store. It was on sale for $2.00 a bottle and I figured I would pick it up and try it one day when I wanted iced coffee but felt too lazy to leave the house. They offered a handful of different flavors including the seasonal favorite, pumpkin spice. I picked up cookies & cream because I like my iced coffee a little sweeter than regular.
This was actually better than I anticipated. To make it more like actual iced coffee, I poured it into a cup over ice and drank it through a straw. It had a fairly strong coffee taste, especially in comparison to the Starbucks Frappachino bottled drinks. This one was advertised as being cookies and cream flavored, and although I can’t say that I tasted cookies, I would say that the coffee flavor wasn’t that intense so I think this flavoring made for a lighter and sweeter taste than the original iced coffee flavor.
The whole bottle contains 290 calories which seems kind of steep. Although when I do get iced coffee from Dunkin’ it is with caramel swirl and whole milk so I’m certain I’m probably drinking more than 290 calories, so I would assume this is a comparable calorie count. Also, the bottle is rather large – 13.7 oz. which is the same as the larger size Frappachino drinks, but I usually get the 9.5 oz. so this seemed like a lot of liquid and I only drank about half.
If this is all that is available and you can’t get your hands on the real stuff, then this is a solid purchase that will satisfy you.
5. Ghirardelli Chocolate Peanut Butter Premium Brownie Mix
Lastly, I have one more mug cake mix to review! I was kind of all set with mug cakes, since I reviewed four of them recently, but my mom insisted that she saw some new brand of them that she had never heard of at her grocery store. She couldn’t recall the name, so I decided to see if I could find what she was referring to while I was shopping. I didn’t see any brand that I had not ever heard of, but I did see that Ghirardelli had rolled out a line of mug cakes. I think Ghirardelli makes an excellent boxed brownie mix so when I saw that they had a peanut butter brownie mug cake mix I decided to buy it!
I followed the directions one afternoon and woofed this down. It’s really tasty. I wouldn’t say it was as good as the Betty Crocker Hot Fudge Brownie (the additional frosting packet really makes that one top notch) but this was really good. My only complaint is that I would have liked a little bit stronger of a peanut butter flavor. The only peanut butter flavor I was really getting was from these little peanut butter chips which really don’t pack much flavor. The brownie itself was moist and definitely fulfilled my sweet tooth for the day. I would most likely repurchase this or try another mug brownie flavor by Ghirardelli.
That’s all for today! Have you tried any of these products and liked them? Let me know in the comments!
Hope everyone has a great day!
xo
Holly
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