There's just something about a root beer float that screams summertime. You've got the earthy bite of the root beer, the sweet vanilla cream, and the fizz of the soda. They all come together for such a great flavor that's cold and refreshing. And why root beer? I mean, cola floats work just fine. I think it's the way the root beer and ice cream interact to create such a fluffy head of foam. Can a solid piece of candy possibly capture the magic of a real root beer float?
Trader Joe's Root Beer Float Pieces will run you $3.79, and I must admit they're fun and unique. They've got a vanilla cream sandwich cookie for a base which is covered in a root beer flavored confectionery coating. Plot twist: there are Pop Rocks to add fizz, just like actual root beer. Okay, it's "popping candy." But we all know who made popping candy famous.
The vanilla cream in the center is cloyingly sweet. And it's topped with cookie which is topped with more sweet candy. It's a bit over the top in terms of sugary sweetness if you ask me. Part of the brilliance of a root beer float is the balance of flavors. There's definitely some root beer taste in these candies, but the cookie part of the equation overshadows it by a good margin.
Sonia and I like Trader Joe's Root Beer Float Bars popsicles significantly better than these dry candies—review coming soon. Their flavor is much closer to that of a traditional root beer float and the refreshment factor is head and shoulders higher than these sticky sweet candy pieces. These root beer bites definitely have their fanbase—plenty of rave reviews out there if you go looking for them. We'll put 'em solidly in "not bad" territory. The beautiful wifey gives Trader Joe's Root Beer Float Pieces seven and a half out of ten stars. I'll throw out seven out of ten.
It's true that some TJ's products can vary from batch to batch, but my goodness, if our box of Trader Joe's Flakes & Strawberries Cereal was anywhere close to average, then they seriously need to change the photo on the cover of the package. It's straight up misleading to show a bowl of flakes with about eight or nine freeze dried strawberry slices sitting right on top when in reality there are only two or three per bowl, on average.
Sonia's first bowl had none. Zip. Zero. Nada. Zilch. We dug through the bag and manually added some strawberries we found on down the way. Even if you divvy up the berries so there's one in each of your first bites, there are still way more bites with nothing but flakes left over at the end.
In fairness, the flakes aren't bad in and of themselves. They have a nice crunch. They don't get soggy too quickly. We like the wheat and rice blend. They're lightly sweet. Not bad, not bad.
But if we wanted plain flakes, we'd have purchased plain cereal. We're hunting for strawberries here. Enter: Trader Joe's Freeze Dried Strawberries to save the day. I think the price went up on the berries since we published that review, but it's still a very decent product—along with its blueberry counterpart.
The freeze dried strawberries product appears to be the exact same commodity that we find sparsely distributed throughout the cereal. They're thin slices of brittle strawberry, mostly good quality. Same color. Same texture. Same good sweet-tart flavor.
After adding a whole bunch of the extra strawberry pieces, the cereal went from zero to hero. We easily finished our bowls, and a couple days later, the bag. Of course, you could always add fresh strawberries. That would work, too. I mean, you can always dress things up to suit your taste, but when the title of the product advertises strawberries, we're expecting a decent amount of strawberries to already be in the cereal.
$2.99 for the 11.7 oz box. Kosher. Product of Canada. Sonia would like to point out that although we're being a tad critical of this product, it's still better than Special K with Red Berries. Fair enough. Still, we probably wouldn't pick up Trader Joe's Flakes & Strawberries Cereal again for lack of freeze dried berries. Six and a half stars from Sonia. Five and a half stars from me.
