Snack Review: Sweet Street Desserts

I was a tough customer for these. First of all, I bake from scratch. Second of all, I live in a big city with access to plenty of bakeries, and don’t really need to order cake in the mail.

Third of all: They make a big selling point of the fact that these are the same desserts that you get in restaurants, and now you can get them at home! Note that what this means is that they are the desserts you get in restaurants that don’t make their own desserts, but instead buy them frozen. Since I am highly suspicious of any restaurant that doesn’t make its desserts in-house, I am extremely unimpressed with this selling point.

I’m just putting my cards on the table here, so you know where I’m coming from, to be fair to these products. But I figured, hey, maybe I have been going to the wrong chain restaurants. And I never met a baked good that I wouldn’t try at least once, so I wasn’t going to turn my nose up at these when they arrived at my door.

I got two kinds to sample, Toffee Crunch Blondie, and the Summerberry Stack. My assistant at the Snackerrific Silver Spring outpost, who is not that big a fan of dessert, insisted on defrosting and trying the blondies immediately, they looked so good to him. They definitely looked pretty. Remember, these are made for the restaurant trade, so the way they look on the dessert tray or in the glossy color pictures in the dessert menu is critical. If the goal of these products was to have us look at them and think OOO, WANT NOW, it worked.

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Snack Review: Chocolate Chip Cookie Showdown

The recent issue of Consumer Reports rates chocolate chip cookies. I was - intrigued? offended? dubious? - to find that two brands outranked my favorite Chips Ahoy.

I mean, “favorite” isn’t even the word. In my mind they are the standard, the traditional, THE American cookie. What’s more, they are outranked in these ratings by Keebler.

Here’s the truth, people: As far as I know I’ve NEVER eaten a Keebler cookie. I’ve certainly never chosen to buy them myself. I don’t want cookies baked by creepy little elves in a dirty forest. And yet, Keebler were ranked “very good” and Chips Ahoy only “good.”

Well, this was a challenge. And - what if they were actually better? So of course I had to try them.

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Snack Review: Morinaga Ottoto Korean Barbeque Flavor Crackers

I am sucker for animal-shaped food, and for anything Japanese. So just imagine if the animals were weird and Japanese: squid, crab, blowfish, starfish, tuna, shrimp, octopus, even uni (sea urchin)! Even those big weird ocean sunfish! Yes, I was beside myself.

The shapes are wonderful. The texture is really fantastic - they’re totally puffed up and hollow, even though they retain their animal shapes, and perfectly thin and light and crunchy.

The only catch is that I totally chose the wrong flavor. There are two choices of flavor, Salt and Korean Barbeque. I am not sure what I was thinking when I ordered the Korean Barbeque. I know that I am the kind of person who likes the simple, plain version of things. I never eat potato chips in any flavor other than plain, for instance, which I know is virtually un-American. I wouldn’t eat a barbeque flavor potato chip, for instance, if it were the last food in the house.

But, let’s be honest, Japanese crackers in the shape of squid and blowfish - if these had been Horrible Garbage flavor, I still would have wanted to try them. So I probably wasn’t thinking straight.

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Snack Review: Calorie Mate

They still haven’t come up with that meal in a pill that they promised we’d have in the future. Not that I would want all my meals to be replaced by a pill, but sometimes, when there isn’t time to make a nice event out of a meal, wouldn’t it be a useful thing?

Instead, we have a whole product category of power and energy and granola bars. The problem is, these look too much like candy bars, and have similar flavors to candy bars, so you’re set up to expect a candy bar… and are always disappointed.

I’ve tried a lot of them and have never found one that I’m interested in eating repeatedly. So I was curious to see if the Japanese had come up with something better.

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Snack Review: Japanese Snack Three Course Meal Roundup

Maybe it was just that I couldn’t stand the idea of going out in the cold and rain again to go grocery shopping. But the box I got from our good friends at jlist.com looked like it contained all I needed for a balanced meal. I had a spicy main dish in these Tohato habanero flavored crackers, a vegetable in asparagus Pretz, and my starch and dessert all rolled up into one in Meiji Usuyaki rice crackers coated in white chocolate. What could be more efficient?

The Tohato crackers are very neat little rings with a reddish-orange color that warns of their heat, if you hadn’t already gotten the message from the evil grin on the drawing of the pepper on the front of the bag. My Japanese isn’t up to deciphering the ingredients, but I am guessing this is a wheat cracker. It kind of doesn’t matter, because whatever it is, it’s just a vehicle for the spice. They’re either baked, or fried really brilliantly, because they’re not the least bit greasy.

These are a really fun snack if you like hot food. They are hot enough to wake you up - good idea in this cold rainy weather, as it turns out - and the heat lingers but not so much that you can’t eat more of them.

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