Tag: 3 Musketeers

QUICK REVIEW: 3 Musketeers Birthday Cake

Leonard 8 Comments

3 Musketeers Birthday Cake

What is 3 Musketeers Birthday Cake?

It’s the first new 3 Musketeers in, get this, SIX YEARS! A birthday cake variation that doesn’t include chocolate innards but instead it’s packed with vanilla nougat speckled with colorful sprinkles. It’s still all enrobed in rich milk chocolate.

How is it?

3 Musketeers Birthday Cake 2

You know how chocolate is kind of an overpowering flavor when paired with most things? That’s no more evident than here as the chocolate outside very much takes control of this candy bar. The inside is very nice texturally, but tastes somewhat too milky milk chocolate with an incredibly sweet aftertaste. Birthday cake? Hardly so.

3 Musketeers Birthday Cake 4

I decided to remove the culprit and try the white speckled interior on its own. By the way, the so-called sprinkles, while fun and a nice touch, are more like small colored flakes that don’t add any new texture. I was hoping for big honking sprinkles.

Now without the chocolate, I did get an intense sweet vanilla flavor that comes through in the nougat, and it is more akin to what I associate with a birthday cake flavor. To be honest, though, I felt like I was using a ladle to transfer the contents of a canned jar of vanilla frosting to my mouth and had to pace myself to finish both bars.

Is there anything else I need to know?

3 Musketeers Birthday Cake 3

This bar is exclusive to Walmart at the moment and will be available in minis soon as well along with more retailers in early 2019. Fun history fact: 3 Musketeers got its name because the original candy bar had 3 bars with different flavors – Chocolate, Vanilla, and Strawberry.

Conclusion:

If you love eating frosting from a jar or have a fancy for super sweet milk chocolate, then make sure you pick up 3 Musketeers Birthday Cake as you will likely enjoy it. Otherwise, buy yourself Funfetti cake mix with vanilla frosting and dip the finished product into some melted milk chocolate. It will save you a lot of time by not having to track down this flavor and you’ll get a much better end result.

Purchased Price: $1.34
Size: 2.14 oz./2 bars
Purchased at: Walmart
Rating: 4 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (one 30 gram bar) – 130 calories, 4 grams of fat, 3 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 60 milligrams of sodium, 23 grams of carbohydrates, 0 grams of dietary fiber, 20 grams of sugar, and less than 1 gram of protein.

REVIEW: 3 Musketeers Hot Cocoa with Marshmallow Minis

Margaret 6 Comments

3 Musketeers Hot Cocoa with Marshmallow Minis

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.

3 Musketeers Hot Cocoa with Marshmallow Minis Bag

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 Hot Cocoa with Marshmallow Minis 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.

3 Musketeers Hot Cocoa with Marshmallow Minis Nougat

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.

REVIEW: 3 Musketeers & Milky Way Slammers

Marvo 27 Comments

Copying, cloning, imitating…it seems so easy to do, because it is.

Xeroxing your ass at work, Dolly the Sheep, shitty boy bands, and the midterm exams of anyone who sat next to me in my physics, chemistry, and math classes in college are all examples of how easy it is to copy things. Although, I have to admit that I earned C’s and D’s in my physics, chemistry, and math classes, so I apparently sat next to the wrong people.

Sometimes copying is so easy that you can cut and paste a review from a quasi-product review blog, add your own lame comments, and then claim you wrote the whole damn thing by yourself.

(Editor’s Note: There was a link for the comment above, but I decided to remove it, since he admitted to it and apologized. To be honest, he actually seems like pretty decent guy. So all is good.)

Without copying, imitating, plagiarism and Cliff Notes, I probably wouldn’t have my English degree.

Now if it’s so easy copy things, why is it that these 3 Musketeers and Milky Way Slammers don’t really taste much like actual 3 Musketeers and Milky Way candy bars. I tested it by drinking a swig of a Slammers and then took a bite from the candy bar it was supposed to imitate. They both taste good as chocolate milks, but neither one came really close to tasting like their solid brethren.

It’s sort of like Tito Jackson not being able to match the success, weirdness, and child molestation charges of his brother Michael.

I don’t know about the Milky Way Slammers, but as for the 3 Musketeers Slammers, I think there’s only one reason why it doesn’t really taste like a 3 Musketeer candy bar.

That reason is Splenda, which has been the reason for the war in Iraq, Scientology, Jen and Brad breaking up, spam emails, freeway traffic, white guys who act black, holes in the ozone layer, AFLAC commercials, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, internet porn addiction, Limp Bizkit cover bands, welfare abuse, Madonna adopting children, the lack of laws to protect copyrights in China, my hairy palms, why rappers keep getting shot, dropped calls on cell phones, spinning rims, and for some reason it’s the catalyst that makes me dance when I hear the Duran Duran song, “The Reflex.”

The one thing that surprised me about both the 3 Musketeers and Milky Way Slammers is the fact that they don’t need to be refrigerated, despite containing milk. Of course, after you open it, it is necessary to refrigerate what you don’t drink.

I don’t know about you, but that’s scary AND exciting. It’s as scary and exciting as placing an ad in the “Curious” section of your local alternative newspaper.

(Editor’s Note: Thanks to Matt Freeman from Edelman for sending me the free samples. Oh yeah, TIB reviewed the Starburst Slammers last year. That one I didn’t get free.)

Item: 3 Musketeers & Milky Way Slammers
Price: FREE
Purchased at: Received from PR Firm
Rating: 6 out of 10
Pros: Tastes good as regular chocolate milk. Vitamins and minerals, but not really significant amounts. No child molesting for Tito Jackson. Despite it being made with milk, it doesn’t need to be refrigerated until after opening it or if you want it cold. Low and reduced fat.
Cons: Really doesn’t taste like the actual candy bars they’re named after. Everything Splenda is responsible for. Jacko. Placing an ad in the “Curious” section of your local alternative newspaper.