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.

But how did the taste live up to the appearance? The dark chocolate chunks are good, the toffee chunks are very nice and buttery and not too sticky-in-the-teeth. So the first impressions were good. But as we continued to eat, my assistant said, ‘There’s something wrong. They’re… bland?”

What I realized he was talking about was that they didn’t taste buttery. So I got up to retrieve the box and read the ingredients. The text on the box talks about the history of the blondie as going back to the middle ages before chocolate existed, only eggs, honey, flour, BUTTER, and nuts. It also describes the product as a ‘chewy butterscotch cake.’

Now, I have actually done some  baking from original medieval recipes and I am pretty sure they didn’t have anything that we would recognize as a butterscotch brownie. But that’s beside the point. More important: is what is inside the box a butterscotch brownie? Not if you think such a thing needs to have butter in it. A close look at the fine print reveals that the ingredient used is margarine.

It’s only fair to say that this might not matter to a lot of readers. Your standard for a dessert may be exactly what you get in the restaurants that this company supplies. It’s also possible that you had a mom who used margarine when she baked, and these will taste homemade to you. But if you’re looking for the taste of real butter in your butterscotch brownie, skip it.

One final point I will make is that if you’re impatient, I enjoyed a thin slice of these right out of the freezer much more than I liked them defrosted, maybe because I don’t expect a butter flavor in frozen desserts. I have a feeling that these are going to gradually disappear one thin frozen slice at a time.

The Summerberry Stack is a much more elaborate confection. A bottom layer of graham cracker-y tasting crust, and layers of yellow cake, cheesecake, and key lime pie filling, studded with two kinds of berries, and topped with white stuff. It might be white chocolate cheesecake. Seriously, I lost track. It’s a bit overkilly for me, who likes simple things best, but it was enjoyable as a fruity creamy dessert. The berries taste good, like frozen berries often do - better than the sad fresh ones you mostly get. The key lime pie flavor is nice and vivid. And I’m a sucker for anything like a graham cracker crust even if a cake doesn’t really also need a pie crust.

There’s so much going on in this one that, unlike the blondie, you’re not likely to stop and think that there’s a flavor missing. The taste is mostly of key lime and berry - the graham cracker crust adds to the key lime pie effect - but with other creamy cakey stuff going on, so it’s not as in-your-face limey as a key lime pie. And of course it’s also pretty - nicer than you’d expect for something that got shipped in a cardboard box.

I didn’t test whether you can eat this one frozen too, but it was better cold than when it got up to room temperature. It’s so rich that when it warmed up it was almost greasy. It might be best to both defrost it in the fridge as instructed and also eat it right out of the fridge. And their other suggestion of cutting the pieces in half is a good one, especially if you make the mistake of reading the calorie count. Ouch. You don’t want to know.

The other “Ouch” that needs to be addressed is the price. I was fortunate to get these for free, and you wouldn’t. The Summerberry Stack costs $49 including 2-day shipping (overnight is $15 more). To me, it is definitely not worth the price. But if, unlike me, you lived far from a nice bakery, I can see that the Summerberry Stack might make a good dessert for a fancy party. Even I would not make a dessert that involves all the different components of the Summerberry Stack, and if you only have access to a supermarket bakery, this is probably beyond them too, so if it sounds like your dream cake for a nice occasion, go for it.

But if what you want is a butterscotch brownie, get a copy of the old version of the Joy of Cooking, and there’s a recipe that is the ridiculously easiest thing you will ever bake from scratch. Trust me, you can do it, and you can even use margarine in it, if that’s what you want.

• Sweet Street Desserts Website

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