REVIEW: Little Debbie Pumpkin Spice Rolls

September 12, 2017March 18, 2018 / seansskillet / Leave a comment

Yule logs are a traditional Christmas time dessert made of rolled up cake and icing, popular in Switzerland, Belgium, France, and you guessed it – in mini junk food size at gas stations all across America. The most common junky American version is the Ho Ho, and not far behind are Little Debbie’s smaller, and in my opinion slightly less delicious, Swiss Rolls. But unlike Hostess, Miss Debbie is a rather creative gal when it comes to her cellophane logs, and beefs them up in larger size for Zebra Rolls and regular seasonal themed editions. Although it’s not quite Christmas time yet, in fact it isn’t even officially autumn, I can’t think of many better additions to the scrumptious cake logs than a little spice, and I’ve got just that with Little Debbie’s Pumpkin Spice Rolls.

Off the jump these plump pumpkin rolls are positively bursting with cream filling. It might be because there’s no outer coating to conceal what awaits when normally biting in, but just removing the roll from its wrapper the cream is begging to be devoured. The smell is only subtly spicy, with just some soft cinnamon and vanilla enticing my nostrils, but they look real pretty with their best soft orange glow and a swirly drizzled top for bedazzlement.

There’s not a whole lot of pumpkin flair in the actual flavor of the roll, but there’s much more depth than what Debbie usually offers, and a whole lot more balance than what you typically get with quick-fix baked goods. The normally painfully sweet cream filling, which, as it looked, is incredibly ample, is given its chance to shine admirably against the soft cinnamon in the batter. The absence of coating also let’s the cream feel more impactful, as the soft cake isn’t hindered by a waxy layer and the cream brings all the squishy-ness I want from such a confection.

While I’m generally a fan of more aggressively spiced things, I actually appreciate the softness of the cinnamon flavor in these rolls. Sure, there are some better iterations of cheap pumpkin cakes, but the massive amount of cream and super soft moist-ness reeled me in and kept me excited enough to want to eat more. They remind me more of a mellow Thanksgiving afternoon than a spooky October evening, and surprisingly, I’m quite okay with that.

Rating: 8.5/10
Found at: Target ($1.99)
Quick Nutrition: 1 roll – 260 cal – 11g fat – 5g sat fat – 130mg sodium – 39g carb – 26g sugar – 1g protein

REVIEW: Keebler Limited Batch Dark Chocolate Mint Fudge Stripes

August 28, 2017August 28, 2017 / seansskillet / Leave a comment

Just when you thought those funny little Elves had started to dip into the deep end of limited time offerings, they return with another safe, albeit classic and delicious, limited batch flavor – Dark Chocolate Mint. Although I’ve gotta give them credit, they’re definitely throwing a cookie curveball releasing a flavor traditionally served alongside a blanket of snow at a time when most of the country is still sweating in triple digits. It would be like Oreo dropping their long lost Gingerbread cookie in Spring – it just doesn’t make sense, and yet, I can’t help but feel like there’s no wrong time for a taste of Winter.

Opening up the long crinkly package releases an unmistakable aroma – Thin Mints. These striped cookie tires smell almost identical to the Girl Scouts’ classic that also reign supreme during a time of no Winter Wonderland vibes. Maybe Keebler are onto something, as is evidenced by their year round Thin Mint knockoff Grasshoppers – that people get down on the delicious pairing of chocolate and mint whether or not there’s a long branch of mistletoe dangling over their heads.

The taste is also very similar to Thin Mints, a lovely marriage of chocolate and peppermint, just a bit less minty, and more obviously, much creamier because of the great green stripe of fudge along the top. The extra creamy notes also make the cookie register a bit sweeter than Thin Mints or Grasshoppers, with a heartier, deeper crunch and satisfying smoothness. The stripe on these cookies feels less notoriously waxy than their older siblings with a less hardened texture that provides a more legitimate creaminess than what I know and generally love from some Stripes.

Honestly, there’s not too much more to say about these cookies. The balance of peppermint sharpness to cooling sweetness is on point and it’s a classic pairing that will essentially sell itself. If I had one criticism it would be perhaps to make the cookie a bit more bitter since they used the word “dark” in the title, but overall these are a damn fine grocery cookie that will give anyone a taste of Christmas bliss, even if they’re wearing shorts.

Rating: 8.5/10
Found at: Sent to me by Keebler but spotted at Target and Walmart!
Quick Nutrition: 2 cookies – 140 cal – 6g fat – 4g sat fat – 120mg sodium – 20g carb – 11g sugar – 1g protein

REVIEW: Limited Edition PB & J Oreo

August 25, 2017August 21, 2017 / seansskillet / Leave a comment

It’s back to school week for all the kiddos out there, and let’s just say it how it is – that sucks. The long, care free, sleepless nights of whimsy and wonder are over and get exchanged for homework, bed times, and social anxiety. But hey – at least we get another new Oreo out of it! Despite the sadness of summer ending, I always secretly kind of liked going back to school, since it meant the days would get short and before I knew it a blanket of spookiness would wash over every store and every child’s imagination. I also not-so-secretly love every opportunity I can get to try a new limited time flavor of cookie, and if this long overdue Peanut Butter and Jelly Oreo comes at the sacrifice of teenagers everywhere having to spend $30 on a new backpack – I’ll take it.

The package smells sweet like artificial berries with a bit of swirling artificial peanut butter to back it up. The creme’s are split evenly down the middle, and by the looks of it the peanut butter half is really trying to flex its protein power over the berry, as the tan creme is oozing out of the side in a show of apparent snack time dominance. On the outside is the classic Golden wafer, and I can’t help but be a little sad it isn’t graham. Even though I’ve never had graham cracker bread, the mashup sounds delectably drool-worthy.

While I really liked and was surprised by the execution of the jelly creme in the Jelly Donut Oreo, I’m not liking it nearly as much here. There’s an odd, slightly off-putting floral note that comes across and registers much closer to perfume than jelly. It isn’t the usual punch-in-the-face sweetness that comes with most artificial berry flavors, but I find it distracting, and ultimately overpowering to the usually very hard to overthrow peanut butter. I really wish Nabisco had gone with grape jelly for this Oreo, but the strangest thing is not only does it not taste like grape, it doesn’t really taste like strawberry or raspberry either. It floats in this weird fake tasting space that really reminds me of flowers and has no notable tartness to balance it out.

The peanut butter creme, when I taste it on its own, is very good. It has a slightly thick and gritty texture with a true roasted peanut flavor that strikes a perfect sweet balance in tandem with the golden wafer. Some of the great nuttiness comes through in the complete bite, but a lot of its more subtle notes get drowned out by the sweeter and surprisingly prominent jelly. From what I recall, this creme is a bit saltier and less sweet than the one most of us are familiar with in a Nutter Butter, and I would love to see a Golden Oreo that features just this creme.

While this Oreo is good, and certainly more interesting than a couple of releases earlier this year, I don’t love it, and I really really wanted to. It was a missed opportunity to not layer two thinner creme’s on top of each other, as no one eats peanut butter and jelly in two divided halves. The cookies are far from disgusting, and I will 100% eat the rest of them, but they unfortunately fall into the category of of PB&J products that don’t quite live up to the great flavor combo of the iconic sandwich, and will need an extra spoonful of PB to really pass my persona; tastebud test.

Rating: 7.5/10
Found at: FoodsCo ($2.99)

REVIEW: Honey Bunches of Oats Pecan & Maple Brown Sugar

June 28, 2017June 27, 2017 / seansskillet / 2 Comments

I’ll never forget when I was first introduced to Honey Bunches of Oats. Although I don’t remember the exact day, I remember being taken aback by a cereal that was a legitimate bridge between the sweet technicolor bowls I always wanted and the boring brown clumps my dad tried to force feed me. Honey Bunches represented a turning of the tides, an exercise in compromise, and a cereal that was legitimately tasty without any marshmallows. I loved the original Honey flavor and Almond, and have dabbled in the various berry editions as well, but when Post dropped their latest creation I knew I had to try it. Honey Bunches of Oats Pecan and Maple Brown Sugar combines all of the best elements of breakfast (except donuts) and puts them into one crispy crunchy bowl.

The cereal is a tonal range of tan colors and has a relatively short list of ingredients to achieve this brown-bo of sorts. There’s straight ahead corn flakes, lightly sweetened corn flakes, some somehow crisped up looking whole oats, and those beautiful little pecan bunches. Some of the bunches are more granola-heavy and some of them have more visible pieces of pecans. The mixture carries a lovely sweet and nutty maple pecan scent with a cutting undercurrent of corn.

Tasting the cereal dry is everything I want it to be – crunchy, nutty, maple-y, and only slightly sweet. As with all Honey Bunches varieties the different elements compliment each other very well and balance each other out for consecutive cohesive bites that pop with the occasional big cluster. I’m not sure how they do it but I always felt there was a creaminess to Honey Bunches cereals that not many other had. Maybe it’s the inclusion of small pieces of nuts, but I get a wonderful smooth vanilla presence here that I also get in the original Almonds flavor and it’s a real treat.

Bringing milk to the party softens some of the sweet maple notes and drives up the corn-y flake flavors. While I feel like the sweetness was perfect in the dry cereal, with the additional moisture I could use just a touch more sweetness, especially in regards to the maple, to hold up to the sogg-ing effect of the milk. The corn flakes are very thin and soften pretty quickly, while the clusters hold their own and stand strong against the milk. The more that I eat the cereal the more I realize I want more pecans. The pecans are mostly in small pieces and end up getting lost in the flurry of milk and flakes. I wish they were bigger and I wish the corn flakes got less floppy but I also wish my bowl would refill itself automatically because I just love eating this stuff.

Honey Bunches of Oats are a classic cereal that should hypothetically please all palates at the breakfast table. I love the maple flavor in this new version but don’t think I would put it above the OG Almond because of the backseat the pecans take as compared to the prominent amount of almond slivers in the classic blue box . All in all you will not be disappointed putting this cereal into milk, onto ice cream, or simply into a ziplock bag for snacking all day long.

Rating: 8.5/10
Found at: Safeway ($3.99)

REVIEW: Salted Caramel Oreo Thins

June 26, 2017June 26, 2017 / seansskillet / Leave a comment

It’s already been well established that sweet and salty is one of the greatest flavor combos known to man, so naturally, salted caramel is one of the more readily available flavor profiles that really gets my digestive juices flowin’. Shockingly, as popular as this pairing has been in recent years, Nabisco overlooked making a salted caramel Oreo in favor of, you know, cotton candy, root beer float, and rainbow sherbet – BUT NO MORE!! …sort of. To get our beach bods prepped for long summer nights, Oreo have hit us with Salted Caramel Oreo Thins.

I like Oreo Thins, but straight up the flavor on these limited slimmies is simply not strong enough. The package lets out a nice artificial caramel smell that channels packaged caramel corn mixed with the golden vanilla of the Oreo wafer and a hint of carnival nostalgia. Biting in as a whole the cookie has a verrrry subtle caramel flavor with a touch of saltiness that makes the overall experience a bit less sweet than the regular Golden Thin but not really venturing into the “salted caramel” territory proper. They actually remind me of a more muted version of the recent Waffles & Syrup Oreo the way that they hint at graham cracker and are generally sweet but with a deeper flavor than you would find in white cookies with white creme.

Isolating the creme on its own is similarly disappointing. There’s definitely more caramel flavor that comes through without the two cookies, but even on its own the flavor isn’t particularly pronounced. It’s almost as though even on its own there isn’t enough creme to properly translate a more complex flavor like salted caramel. Eating the cookie open faced style is more of the same, but with the saltiest presence of the different methods – maybe the hint of cookie plus creme gives the best sodium punch as this is the only way any kind of “salted” caramel comes through for me. Fortunately the creme is very easy to peel off and when I stacked two layers of creme into one sando the combo worked surprisingly well. The flavor was both salty AND caramel-y and the texture felt thick and dense like caramel too – an easy, successful fix!

While I was initially pretty excited to see some flavor twists on the Oreo Thins line, the execution here makes me wonder if doing special releases with so little creme and cookie to work with can actually be successful. If Nabisco wants to venture down this path again they need to use bolder flavors that will cut through in smaller quantities like their Lemon Thins, rather than flavors that can be easily muddled like salted caramel. The recently re-released full size Key Lime Pie and Blueberry Pie Oreo creme’s would work really well here, making a light, crispy, refreshing cookie treat, and I’m confident the smaller amount of filling would still pop against the thin golden wafer.

Rating: 7/10
Found at: Target ($2.99)

REVIEW: Hostess Cinnamon Sugar Crunch Donettes

June 19, 2017June 19, 2017 / seansskillet / 1 Comment

As a weekly host and attendee of Cinnasluts Anonymous meetings I’m always on the hunt for new ways to get my fix. I’ve got four different types of cinnamon on hand to sprinkle on everything from fruit to chicken to vegetables, and of course a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Cinnamon Bun Oreo’s, a couple stocked bags of Cheetos Sweetos, some apple cinnamon yogurt, a bottle of Pepsi Fire…and the list goes on and on. As I was perusing the grocery store to stockpile more cinna-goodies my body came to a jolting stop right after passing the cinnamon swirl bread and into the snack cakes…Cinnamon Sugar Crunch Donettes. That’s right, Hostess have put a spicy spin on their tasty crunch mini donuts, and to be honest it’s such an obvious twist I can’t believe this hasn’t already been done.

Opening the tall white bag it’s no surprise I’m greeted by a sweet wafting cinnamon sugar smell that is fresh and lovely. The donuts look soft and glisten with a locked in moisture that is a great sign for $2 grocery ‘nuts.

Biting in the two stated flavors, cinnamon and sugar, and very well represented and lean towards the sugar with a nice crystallized crunch, completing the trinity of living up to their names’ description. The prominent flavor is sweet, but the lovely aromatic spiciness of cinnamon lingers in the back and keeps them from being too sugary. While I love a good punchy, almost spicy hot cinnamon, the balance here is spot on and reminds me of a well executed streusel crumble on top of an apple crisp.

The texture inside is soft and moist and tastes very fresh. The donette doesn’t crumble at all and has a perfect squish as I chew that works well with the sweet crunchy exterior. These are basically exactly like the classic coconut-leaning Crunch Donettes but with cinnamon, which makes them automatically better, and feel much more authentic to a real donut than a gas station pick-me-up.

I always loved the straight forward cinnamon sugar cake donuts at mom ’n pop shops for their simple flavors and emphasis on the crispy cake-y dough. They were also the most successful donut I ever made the few times I tried going from scratch at home, and as a result they will forever hold a special place in my heart. While these donettes aren’t as good as the real deal, they’re closer than any other variety I’ve had from Hostess, Little Debbie, or TastyKake at channeling the classic flavors of a bare bones donut shop, and they don’t taste cheap or artificial at all. Whether you love cinnamon or just a quick fix to go with your morning cup, these are one of the strongest baby cakes you can buy.

Rating: 9/10
Found at: Walmart ($2.00)

REVIEW: Fudge Stripes Lemmy Num-Num’s

June 12, 2017June 11, 2017 / seansskillet / 2 Comments

When it became apparent that Keebler were going to enter the Oreo game and have limited Fudge Stripes chase after what Nabisco has been doing for years I was stoked, but I didn’t anticipate having to chase down the flavors myself with such difficulty. Sometime in April Keebler released Lemon Cream Pie Fudge Stripes and after looking everywhere from Target to Walmart to Safeway they just never popped up, and instead it seemed like 500 new packs of Cinnamon Roll were birthed every time I went back to check. With the release of Despicable Me 3, the cross-promotion between the cookie company and film includes an apparent rebranding of the pie flavor to “Lemmy Num-Num”, and this version has decided to make its way to the bay so I can finally try them. Of course, since this release there’s already been two more Fudge Stripes that I haven’t seen, but, that’s another story…

Opening the package the cookies have a nice, soft, lemony scent that remind me of an amped up version of Barnum’s Animals Crackers. The flavor mimics the smell with a gentle lemon flavor that isn’t too bold or tart, with a slight butteriness and smooth creamy finish. There isn’t a huge amount of sweetness either, and these cookies kind of just “exist”, without any super dominant or super offensive flavors, which is kind of rare for lemon. The texture is nice – soft and crumbly with a little bit of crunch just like all other Fudge Stripes.

I like these, they’re very tasty, but ultimately they don’t deliver as big of a lemony wallop as I would like. It’s tricky with the renaming and rebranding of a cookie that was Lemon Cream Pie now being “Lemmy Num Num” because if they were trying to channel a lemon pie they did a pretty decent job. While I still wish they were zingy-er and more tart, there is a solid lemon flavor for the filling, the crumbly cookie for the pie crust, and the “fudge” dip and drizzle to emulate the cream or meringue that would top the pie. All of the components work well together, albeit a bit muted, and putting back many of these in a row is no problem at all. Snack on.

Rating: 7.5/10
Found at: Walmart ($2.99)

VIDEO: Sean’s appearance on KQED’s Check Please, Bay Area!

June 10, 2017June 10, 2017 / seansskillet / Leave a comment

Earlier this year I was fortunate enough to shoot an episode of one of my favorite local TV shows – Check Please, Bay Area, which airs on KQED/PBS. I had the opportunity to highlight one of my favorite burger spots ever – Jack’s Prime – and try some other amazing dishes along the way. This is my first time doing food-related work on television and it was a blast. Check out the full episode below!

REVIEW: Baskin Robbins Made with Twix Bars

June 7, 2017June 5, 2017 / seansskillet / 1 Comment

Twix are an all time top 5 candy bar for me, and with the recent release of the very successful and delicious Twix Dark, it feels like the cookie candy hybrid bar is getting some legit time in the limelight; but still seem very underutilized in the ice cream world. While it’s fairly common to see M&M’s, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and even Snickers churned into succulent scoops, the layered caramel magic of Twix rarely finds itself mixed into any decent cream – until now. Following up on their core lineup’s “Made with Snickers” and last years June Flavor of the Month “Made with Milky Way”, Baskin Robbins are back in the candy cream game via Made with Twix Bars, which combines Twix bar cookie pieces, chocolate flakes, and a caramel ribbon with both caramel and chocolate malt ice creams.

The base ice cream is different than I expected, with a bit more cohesion and blending than two separate flavors being put into one scoop. I anticipated something more along the lines of Gold Medal Ribbon, where there are distinct layers of chocolate and vanilla, but here the caramel and chocolate malt have fused together to make more of an off-white, and ultimately pretty Twix-y flavor. There are traces of malt, but the chocolate is pretty light and subdued, with some sweet and also subdued caramel notes lingering underneath. The taste really is reminiscent of a Twix with an overall sweet and slightly bread-y (malt) flavor that channels the marriage of the cookie and caramel in the bar, but overall it’s lacking a little bit of pop.

The caramel swirl is a tasty and straight-forward sweet with no salty or deep burnt tones. It’s well-executed and again, very reminiscent of the caramel in a Twix, but I wish there was more of it. The ribbons are a bit thin and too scattered throughout to add the layer of richness that I want, and with caramel being such a prominent note in a Twix I’m searching for more of that gooey goodness, especially with the base not carrying as many strong caramel notes as I would like.

The mix-ins are also a little different than I imagined, and rather than being pieces of chopped up regular Twix bars, it’s just the cookie portion of the Twix covered in chocolate with no caramel. This was a actually a pretty smart move, as sometimes thicker chunks of caramel can freeze hard in ice cream, and the cookies maintained all of their crunchy crumbly texture without being compromised by anything tough and tooth-threatening. The chocolate flakes are pretty big by BR standards and do good to add a solid milk chocolate flavor to most bites.

Overall this is a pretty solid interpretation of Twix in ice cream form, with actual Twix mixed in and a base that mirrors the flavors of the candy bar itself. I really appreciate it when an ice cream can operate on multiple levels rather than just throwing something into vanilla ice cream (an issue I have with BR’s Reese’s flavor), and this scoop is testament that a little extra effort can go a long way. With more caramel and a couple more cookie pieces this could have been one of Baskin Robbins’ more impressive LTO flavors, but as it stands it falls a bit short of being a classic.

Rating: 7/10
Found at: Baskin Robbins

REVIEW: Salt & Straw’s Breakside Brewery’s Spent Grains & Bacon S’mores

June 5, 2017June 4, 2017 / seansskillet / Leave a comment

No stranger to being the cool kids in the ice cream class, Salt & Straw are kicking off the summer season with an entire line of gourmet flavors using recycled and rescued ingredients. No, they didn’t dig through the garbage to make a creamy casserole of mismatched scraps, but rather, sought out byproducts of food processes, fruit too bruised to sell at full price, or bread that is too stale to stay on shelves and flipped them into inventive flavors of melty indulgence. As a country that wastes 40% of our food, this is a great thing to do for the United States, and owners Kim and Tyler Malek estimate this limited line alone will save around 2,000 pounds of food waste. For Breakside Brewery’s Spent Grains & Bacon S’mores, S&S utilized the flavor of leftover grains and malts from brewing beer and combined them with chocolate chunks and a bacon marshmallow fluff swirl.

Anytime that I see bacon as a component used in a sweet or non-traditional way I get skeptical that it is there purely for gimmick because of the “everything is better with bacon” hype, but with this flavor that couldn’t be farther from the truth. The marshmallow swirl is composed of 70% or so pure fluffy sweet marshmallow fluff, with an incredible balance of bounce and sugar that is everything a marshmallow should be – it’s perfect. Dispersed sporadically throughout the ‘mallow are chunks of bacon that cut through the sweetness with a touch of salt and a wonderfully pronounced smokiness that evokes the flavors of a campfire. The bacon is used not only to add an interesting tasting component, but to elevate the entire s’mores experience to a new, truer level than I’ve had in ice cream and it is fantastic.

The chocolate, unsurprisingly because it’s Salt & Straw, is incredibly dark and bitter with a big, bold cocoa flavor and an interesting gritty texture. It tastes very high quality and feels like some of the spent grains were used in the pieces, as there’s a chunky density to the chocolate instead of the typical smooth and clean texture that usually coincides with chips/chunks.

Rounding the entire s’mores experience out is the actual ice cream itself, which is a slightly gritty yet still silky smooth graham cracker base with light honey notes and hints of earthiness. The texture feels like a bunch of crackers were ground up and soaked in cream and then churned without any kind of aggressive straining to filter out the bits. The base is also where the recycled component comes into play, mixing the roasted spent grains from Breakside Brewery in conjunction with the graham to create a deep slightly smoky presence, and there are no odd flavors that seem out of place or boozy for a s’mores ice cream; everything works incredibly well.

The only element missing from an ideal s’mores experience is gooey melted chocolate, but all the flavors are represented and the execution of the recycled theme is spot on. A wonderful start to the June line, this one is a must try for people who love marshmallow, s’mores, or bacon used in brilliant new ways.

Rating: 9/10
Found at: http://www.saltandstraw.com or in scoops shops in Portland, OR

Sean's Skillet

ice cream, snack reviews, and bay area eats

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