REVIEW: Dairy Queen Caramel Apple Pie Blizzard

What is the Dairy Queen Caramel Apple Pie Blizzard

It’s one of the stars of the Dairy Queen Fall Blizzard Menu. It contains apple topping, pie pieces (or more accurately, pie crust pieces as I’ll explain below) and caramel coated truffles with vanilla soft serve and the obligatory garnish for all pies, whipped topping.

How is it?

Let me ramble a bit before I answer that question. I had high expectations for this Blizzard because I love me some apple pie. I’m not talking about grandma’s secret recipe pie with the steam rising from the top as it emerges from the oven. Yes, I’m sure your Gammy’s pie is delicious, but for some reason I’ve always been partial to the industrial strength versions.

The main reason I went to middle school every day (OK, most days, unless I could successfully fake a stomachache) was to get one of those tasty, sugar-loaded Hostess apple pies at lunch. And even now, I still tear up a little thinking about the long-extinct fried apple pie at McDonald’s, despite the real risk of permanent mouth injury caused by its hot-as-lava filling. This Blizzard reminds me of that Hostess/McDonald’s pie taste, without the latter’s third-degree burns. And the addition of the truffles make this something special.

There’s so much going on with this Blizzard, but everything blends together beautifully. This certainly isn’t the best-looking Blizzard ever, and even when you take away the whipped topping, it’s ordinary looking. But as I learned in middle school when I wasn’t eating Hostess pies, don’t judge a book, or a Blizzard, by its cover.

Because I am dedicated to my craft, I took the time to extract the three different pieces for you to examine (crust, apple, truffle from left to right). If it disgusts you to know that I had to suck and lick the soft serve off each piece, then just don’t read this sentence. I even dissected the truffle so you can see its guts spill out.

The crust pieces maintain their crispness even while encased in soft serve, the apple chunks deliver a subtle but satisfying fruit flavor, and the caramel coated truffles are very indulgent with their ooey-gooey center. It seems like most new Blizzards either feature chocolate or some sort of berry as the main component, so this one also stands out for being unique.

Anything else you need to know?

One of the other Blizzards on the fall menu, the Pumpkin Pie Blizzard, has “real” pumpkin pie pieces. But this one is worded a bit differently on the DQ website, which proclaims that it contains “apple topping” and “pie pieces.”

After perusing the list of ingredients and skipping over many, many words that I can neither pronounce nor define, I confirmed that the pie pieces here are indeed just pie crust pieces. That, of course, raises the question of whether a pie crust on its own is a pie, but I’ll let those more scholarly than I debate such topics. So to answer the question at hand — no, you didn’t need to know any of that.

Conclusion:

The only thing that kept me from giving this Blizzard a perfect score is that the apple pieces are a bit small and rubbery, like they were harvested from a fruit cake. And if you take a bite that doesn’t contain a chunk of apple, there’s really no fruit flavor in the soft serve, so it might have been nice to get some kind of apple flavoring or sauce in there. But those are just minor grouses; overall, this is an exceptional Blizzard, and I’m happy it will be around all fall.

Purchased Price: $4.39
Size: Medium
Rating: 9 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (Medium) 930 calories, 37 grams of fat, 26 grams of saturated fat, 1 gram of trans fat, 65 milligrams of cholesterol, 420 milligrams of sodium, 133 grams of carbohydrates, 1 gram of dietary fiber, 103 grams of sugar, and 16 grams of protein.