Author: Erin

REVIEW: Dunkin’ Ice Spice Munchkins Drink

Erin 8 Comments

Have you ever wondered what’s better than having your cake and eating it too? Dunkin’ is here with your answer: having your cake donut, blending it with frozen coffee, covering it with caramel and whipped cream, and drinking it through a straw. That’s right, Dunkin’ has teamed up with rapper Ice Spice for a new Fall beverage, the Ice Spice Munchkins Drink, and the name says it all. It’s an icy, pumpkin-spicy, super-sweet concoction with pumpkin munchkins blended right in. If you’re not familiar, Ice Spice has a handful of Billboard Hot 100 hits this year, and the tie-in stems from her fans being called munchkins, a reference to her song “Munch (Feelin’ U).”

The drink is frozen coffee (cream, liquid sugar, coffee syrup, and ice) blended with pumpkin munchkins donut holes, served in a caramel drizzled cup that’s topped with whipped cream, more caramel, and a sprinkle of pumpkin spice. Before you go saying it’s weird or gross that the donuts are smashed up in the mix, let’s consider the fact that people throw things like spinach, bananas, ice, and milk together in a blender and call it a smoothie. This is a smoothie for the junk food crowd, and I won’t knock it until I try it.

My drink appeared to be missing any sort of obvious caramel sauce lining the cup, and thank goodness because it was apparent from my first sip that this thing was already plenty sweet. The dusting on top has nice brown sugar and cinnamon notes, but these will be completely lost unless you take off the lid and try it by itself because everything coming up through the straw is so saccharine it becomes one-dimensional. Or two-dimensional, if you count soggy donut crumbs as a dimension.

I originally found the drink’s thickness alright, kind of like a milkshake – albeit one with ice chunks – and the donut crumbles not totally out of place. It has some pumpkin/fall flavor, but the coffee is entirely undetectable and the main flavor notes are cream and sugar with bursts of caramel. It’s too sweet to drink very quickly and doesn’t improve as it sits.

Looking at a spoonful of the mixture evokes an image of what you’d get if you stirred pumpkin puree into whipped cream, and the texture is sort of like a soggy graham cracker. Not more than a few sips in, I was regretting my decision to get a medium.

I have to give Dunkin’ credit for a sort of clever idea for a collaboration (a.k.a. cashing in on a celebrity and the pairing at least making some sense), but it’s too cloying for me. With the absence of any coffee flavor, it’s layer upon layer of sweet things that scream for balance but is only met with wet donuts. Sorry, Ice Spice and Dunkin’, I’m not feelin’ you.

Purchased Price: $4.79
Size: Medium
Rating: 5 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (medium) 830 calories, 39 grams of total fat, 22 grams of saturated fat, 1 gram of trans fat, 105 milligrams of cholesterol, 300 milligrams of sodium, 115 grams of total carbs, 1 gram of dietary fiber, 102 grams of total sugar (96 grams of added sugars), and 7 grams of protein.

REVIEW: Wendy’s Loaded Nacho Cheeseburger

Erin 7 Comments

Wendy’s is ready for Fall, and with gameday food in mind, they’ve decided to smother their cheeseburgers in nacho fixings. The Loaded Nacho Cheeseburger starts with classic elements – beef patty, American cheese, lettuce, tomato – tops them off with poblano queso, spicy chipotle sauce, tortilla strips, and crispy corn, and stuffs them all in a jalapeño cheddar bun. Anyone who’s ever ordered loaded nachos or a nacho helmet at a baseball game knows that these cheesy chips are a fickle mistress. The first few will be crunchy and satisfying, but things will eventually devolve into a soggy mess. Will a burger suffer the same fate? Will Wendy’s version of Corn Nuts save it?

Let’s start with the bun. Despite the obvious cheddar spots on top and jalapeño bits baked in, it doesn’t taste like much on its own. Notably, both times I tried this, there was a nicely browned-looking cheese crust along a third of the bottom bun, like the cheddar had been conveniently placed to spill over into a picture-perfect frico, but it isn’t actually as crispy as it seemed and lacks discernible flavor.

Atop that bun is a standard slice of American cheese (which you’d never notice unless you chose to pick it apart), a single patty of Wendy’s beef (which I consider to be pretty good quality for a fast food burger), a generous helping of poblano queso, tortilla strips, surprising corn kernels, lettuce, tomato, and the spicy sauce. There’s enough of the queso and sauce that the whole thing is a messy experience and definitely eats like what you’d find if you persevered to the bottom of your nacho plate and found everything had become a little too homogenous. The queso is tasty and more flavorful than I expected, while the chipotle sauce either got lost or I didn’t get as much of it. The sandwich has a slight kick, but it never crosses into truly spicy territory or tastes like chipotles. Lettuce would usually add a little crunch to a burger, but here, it forfeits its texture to the cheese/sauce mix, which brings us to the tortilla strips and crispy corn.

Before trying this, I couldn’t picture what the crispy corn would be and wondered if it was just a redundant explanation of the strips. It turns out they’re a unique entity: zestily seasoned jumbo corn kernels akin to Corn Nuts. The few that escaped my burger were nice on their own, but the ones that stayed on managed to either be startlingly crunchy amid the otherwise squishy situation or sogged by cheese into an unpleasant texture. The tortilla strips, not surprisingly, met a similar end, and most of them were left lifeless.

This sounds like a list of complaints, but I enjoyed this burger. Not all of the textures worked out as Wendy’s intended and I would have liked some more jalapeño flavor, but the cheesy-without-being-gloppy poblano queso makes it worth a try as a novelty item.

Purchased Price: $6.29
Rating: 7 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: 710 calories, 43 grams of total fat, 17 grams of saturated fat, 1.5 grams of trans fat, 95 milligrams of cholesterol, 1390 milligrams of sodium, 51 grams of total carbohydrates, 4 grams of dietary fiber, 11 grams of total sugars, and 33 grams of protein.

REVIEW: Doritos Late Night Loaded Taco

Erin 12 Comments

Doritos Late Night line is back, inviting us to taste the night with a Loaded Taco flavor in a slick black and purple bag exclusive to Kroger stores. Past offerings in this series include much missed All Nighter Cheeseburger and Tacos at Midnight, which this new edition appears to be a spiritual successor to.

I’m pretty sure I tried Tacos At Midnight, but since a decade has gone by since those bags graced anyone’s beer can-strewn countertops at 2 a.m., I can’t say for sure this is the second coming of that flavor and will judge it on its own merits.

Looking into the Doritos Late Night Loaded Taco bag

Opening the bag, the scent is very reminiscent of what would waft at you from a Taco Bell paper bag, and the flavor is there to match. It’s decidedly “fast food taco” and not “taqueria taco,” and the emphasis is on the loaded part. They taste like the mess that falls out of a haphazardly made Taco Bell item, and as someone who ends up eating those overly sour creamed lettuce shreds, beef bits, and always worthless pieces of tomato, I mean that as a term of endearment and also kind of amazement. See, all the elements you’d expect to taste are here – the crunch like a hard corn shell, taco seasoning, cheese, sour cream, a hint of tomato, but then there’s also…lettuce? Does iceberg lettuce even taste like anything? Apparently, it does, and I’m pretty convinced that slight vegetal note is here, which seems like the kind of achievement Willy Wonka might be proud of. Sure, anyone can make a chip taste like sour cream and paprika, but can they also manage to layer in the suggestion of lettuce? Frito-Lay can.

Doritos Late Night Loaded Taco is lighter than the chip shown on the bag

The next logical step is wondering if you want a chip that I just said tastes like lettuce. I’d be skeptical too, but it turns out it isn’t a bad thing! The iceberg and tomato make subtle appearances, while the predominant flavors are much more in the dairy spectrum, with cream, sour cream, cheddar, butter, and Swiss all getting mentions in the ingredients list. Alongside a classic mix of Americanized-taco spices and sitting on a crunchy corn chip, these really do manage to mimic a fully topped crispy taco surprisingly well. Appearance-wise, the actual chips don’t look much like the very orange one pictured on the front of the bag, but their lighter yellow color reminds me more of taco shells anyway.

Doritos Late Night Loaded Taco bag says "Taste the Night"

Speaking of, would a Doritos Loaded Taco flavored Doritos Locos Taco be too meta or just right for late night? I’ll leave that one up to the fast food gods. In the meantime, enjoy these chips while they last, which, in the case of my bag, was not very long. If you have a Kroger affiliate near you, these chips are worth trying before the neon signs flip off and they disappear into the night.

Purchased Price: $5.49
Size: 9 oz bag
Purchased at: Mariano’s (Kroger)
Rating: 8 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (About 11 chips) 140 calories, 7 grams of total fat, 1 gram of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 150 milligrams of sodium, 17 grams of total carbohydrates, 1 gram of dietary fiber, less than 1 gram of total sugars, and 2 grams of protein.

REVIEW: Mystery Flavor Fruit Roll-Ups

Erin 5 Comments

General Mills is rebranding its fruit snacks to suit the modern era of lunchbox-toting kids and teens, but in the case of these Mystery Flavor Fruit Roll-Ups, it feels like it went with such a ’90s vibe that it’s targeting the parents and not the offspring. This pack leans entirely on a “weird green guys from outer space” theme that I can’t imagine resonating with today’s kids. But what do I know? The packaging is metallic, and I’ll be damned if weird alien cartoons and shiny things don’t intrigue me.

The pack includes two flavors, Mystery and Solar Melon. I was briefly disappointed that half of these were melon because it gives you fewer chances to guess the mystery flavor. If you’re not familiar with Fruit Roll-Ups, I would describe the flavor of all of them as “This is definitely a Fruit Roll-Up,” but if you can tell the difference between a berry one and whatever the Tie-Dye is, you’re a better person than me. Fruit Roll-Ups are a snack to be eaten as quickly as possible because if they’re fresh, they’re so sticky that you can barely get the plastic off before they collapse in your hand. Definitely do not put them on a plate to photograph like I did. The time from thinking you might give it a taste test to the time you’ve determined that you’d better just shove it all in your mouth before you never get it unstuck from you again is about 8 seconds.

Trying the Mystery flavor, I couldn’t get beyond that it just tasted like I expected a Fruit Roll-Up to taste. Delicious, but overall…normal. Maybe this whole alien theme was a ruse? Maybe space tastes like Fruit Roll-Ups? I didn’t have a clue. Luckily part of this rebranding is a focus on trying to interact beyond the eating of the snack, so General Mills wants you to visit its website, where you can vote on what the flavor is.

Thank Area 51, we have some parameters!

Faced with the choices of Cosmic Citrus Swirl, Stellar Strawberry Peach, Galactic Grape, and Mango Martian, things started to make sense, and I felt pretty confident choosing Strawberry Peach. The strawberry is the classic and dominant flavor, but there’s a little more there, and it will remind you of Peach Rings.

To its credit, the unmysterious Solar Melon is a perfect shade of alien-green and a welcome addition to the box. It manages to taste like a blend of fruits with a melon focus but not in an overly artificial way like many watermelon candies.

The sheets are printed with tongue tattoos in various alien, UFO, and space designs. Because eating a Fruit Roll-Up inherently involves playing with your food, I went ahead and applied a UFO-XING sign to my tongue. It worked like a charm, and by that I mean it left my tongue with an unintelligible giant blue blob on it. You can thank me later for not including that photo. It might not be the most original attempt at a mystery flavor, but eating these is a fun and tasty way to spend two minutes, and who knows, you might win a galactic fanny pack before you’re beamed back up to the mothership.

Purchased Price: $2.29
Size: 10-count box of 0.5 oz rolls
Purchased at: Mariano’s
Rating: 8 out of 10 (Mystery Flavor), 7 out of 10 (Solar Melon)
Nutrition Facts: (1 roll) 50 calories, 1 gram of total fat, 0.5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 50 milligrams of sodium, 12 grams of total carbohydrates, 7 grams of sugar (including 7 grams of added sugar), and 0 grams of protein.

REVIEW: Wendy’s Ghost Pepper Ranch Chicken Sandwich

Erin 5 Comments

Before every fast food chain and its brother started making chicken sandwiches that were actually good, Wendy’s had it figured out. It had the logistics of a solid chicken breast fillet and a spicy version essentially perfected, at least by drive-thru standards.

A few years ago, it introduced a Ghost Pepper Ranch dipping sauce, but this is the first time that sauce has graced a chicken sandwich (unless you were savvy enough to do it yourself), and it’s now being joined by several other layers of heat and flavor. The much-loved spicy chicken breast is topped with ghost pepper-infused American cheese, ghost pepper and ranch-seasoned crispy onions, lettuce, tomato, and ghost pepper ranch sauce.

My first impression of this sandwich, both times I tried it, was that it looked exceptionally well put together. The buns were glossy and not squashed, the cheese nicely melted, the mostly unnecessary vegetable toppings fresh looking, the fried onions abundant and still crispy, the chicken breast devoid of any weirdness, and everything properly sauced with a little extra spilling out onto the wrapper for good measure. Ghosts can be tricky things though, so let’s not get caught up in appearances. Sure, it looks good and innocent enough, but how does it taste?

I’m happy to report it tastes as good as it looks! It probably isn’t as spicy as the moniker sets you up for, but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. This isn’t a demon sandwich; it’s more of a gentle haunting, and did we really expect anything more from Wendy’s? The heat never smacks you in the face, nor does it linger long. It’s pleasantly spicy and might make you want to sip your drink, but if you happened to eat it in the absence of any beverages, it wouldn’t leave you with your mouth on fire.

Since my sandwiches were evenly sauced, it wasn’t easy to try the ghost pepper cheese on its own, but from the small unsauced portion I got, I did think the cheese was flavorful and not your standard American. There’s a generous portion of onions that also aren’t particularly spicy, but they are crunchy, zesty, and a welcome addition. I have nothing against ranch, but it isn’t something that typically calls to me. It’s not my preferred dipping sauce or even salad dressing, but I really enjoyed this version. It has a nice buttermilk taste, and the ghost pepper plus extra herbs take it in a more interesting direction.

For as many times as “ghost pepper” is mentioned in the description, I could see people being disappointed in this if they wanted serious spice. If you temper your expectations and if you’re a fan of Wendy’s spicy chicken, consider this a very solid, kicked up version that won’t give you nightmares.

Purchased Price: $6.89
Rating: 8 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: 690 calories, 35 grams of total fat, 8 grams of saturated fat, 0.27 grams of trans fat, 90 milligrams of cholesterol, 1650 milligrams of sodium, 61 grams of total carbohydrates, 3 gram of dietary fiber, 7 grams of total sugars, and 32 grams of protein.