Lethargy and laze with a high chance of napping.
These are the symptoms of the post-Thanksgiving coma.
Despite my foreknowledge of said tryptophan comatose, I remained surprised when I awoke last Friday with enough mental fog to cause a Los Angeles brownout. In a moment of clarity, I thumped down to the forgiving lights of the local Kmart in search of a cure.
Thankfully, the shelves were stocked to the brim with an abundance of seasonal sucrose offerings promising the sugar rush needed to counteract my case of the Thanksgiving Sleepies. Seeing as this is the time of year I find new ways to sneak a mug of hot chocolate into my daily schedule, it seemed fitting to initiate my cure with a shiny new bag of 3 Musketeers Hot Cocoa Minis.
Nothing like a bag of sugary polyhedra to snap me wide awake.
Each mini comes in the form of a little 25-calorie cube, which, in my mind, makes them multi-taskers. They’re just the right size for snacking, sharing, or plopping between graham crackers. They would also make perfect checker/chess pieces. That way, when you whoop your opponent, you can also eat his/her pieces.
I could also see them serving as excellent Lincoln Logs.
3 Musketeers: fueling the minds for a new generation of architects.
The outer shell of milk chocolate here seems a bit thinner than the ol’ regular bar, but it adds the appropriate sweet snap before arriving at the nougat core.
Oh, nougat, what a legacy you have in the world of chocolate bars.
The poof of nougat within a 3 Musketeers is stuck in an existential void between goo and fluff, and, by gum, it’s a tasty existential void. The nougat here is chocolate and seems quite similar to the original…almost too similar. However, if you close your eyes and use your imagination, you may detect a certain toasty-powdery-ness, which I suspect is meant to mimic powdered hot chocolate. Peculiar for my taste, but I admired it for what it hoped to achieve.
The one biggie that left me broken-hearted was the absence of the marshmallow. Perhaps the nougat itself was meant to represent said fluff? Or perhaps the marshmallow melted in the cooking process? I was unsure and semi-suspicious.
Nonetheless, I wanted to make sure I followed through with the “hot” part of the “hot cocoa” theme, so I crammed seven of the cubes in a mug and zapped them in the microwave for 5 seconds. Oh buddy, was that worth it. At first glance it looked like nothing had changed, but, upon whipping out a spoon and digging in, the cubes smooshed together to form a gooey, cake batter-like substance [fair warning: if you microwave, it gets a little messy, so consider microwaving in something you’d be willing to throw away].
Lots of beautiful things are small. Paperclips. Tangerines. Travel shampoo bottles. While it’s hard to beat travel shampoo bottles, I’d give these 3 Musketeers the thumbs-up to join the group. They’re convenient little packages of chocolate-y joy that taste at least 15 times better than a jungle of tropical poinsettias. At the same time, they feel dangerously close to the original, giving them broad possibilities to grow. Keep growing, 3 Musketeers, keep growing.
(Nutrition Facts – 7 pieces – 180 calories, 45 calories from fat, 4 grams of fat, 3.5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 5 milligrams of cholesterol, 70 milligrams of sodium, 31 grams of carbohydrates, 1 gram of dietary fiber, 27 grams of sugars, and 1 gram of protein.)
Item: 3 Musketeers Hot Cocoa with Marshmallow Minis
Purchased Price: $3.49
Size: 10 oz. bag
Purchased at: Kmart
Rating: 6 out of 10
Pros: Snappy milk chocolate coating. Nice size. Nougat legacy. Lincoln Logs. Gooey cake batter. Travel shampoo bottles.
Cons: Peculiar toasty-powdery taste. A bit too close to the original. Absence of marshmallows. Nougat in an existential void. Thanksgiving comas. Eating tropical poinsettias.