Trader Joe's Birthday Cake Bar

White chocolate lovers, rejoice! All others, go about your business as usual.

All three of us in the world that appreciate white chocolate—no, wait...we did get a comment recently from a gal who loves white chocolate, so there must be at least four of us—should totally try this bar. It's great quality white chocolate, very sweet and creamy. What else is going on here? Not a whole lot. But simple is good. Let's take a look.

In addition to delectable white chocolate (I'm not a white chocolate supremacist, it's just my personal preference) there are colorful sprinkles and cookie crumbs which give the bar a fun appearance and crunchy texture, although the cookie crumbs are especially hard to detect visually since they're white on white. But make no mistake, they are there. And not only do they add a crispity-crunchitiness, they add a subtle amount of birthday cake flavor, too. 

The sprinkles just add that magical unicorn rainbow happiness that tends to make grown men smile and giggle. No? That's not a thing? I meant a magical unicorn rainbow happiness that grown men tend to be completely indifferent to. Ahem. <Clears throat and continues narration a full octave lower than before.>

There's no kale in here. No bacon. Nothing super weird, although TJ's—or TJ's third party supplier, as the case may very well be—did find a way to work in some interesting ingredients like beet juice and turmeric for color in the sprinkles (or "jimmies" if you prefer) and rice and potato flours in the crumbs. I guess the overall effect is vaguely birthday cake-ish, but mostly, it's just white chocolate.

The bar comes in six squares, perfect for breaking off a piece and saving the rest for later, although the product isn't particularly large to begin with. I could have easily polished off the whole thing by myself in one sitting. I did share with Sonia, however, even though she wasn't as impressed as I was. She doesn't like white people that much—er, I mean white chocolate that much at all. She prefers dark and occasionally milk chocolate like most of you silly humans.

I would have been tempted to push this product into at least the "really darn good" category just by virtue of it being made of white chocolate, but in light of its relatively small size and price tag of $1.99, it's not the best candy value in the store. I still give it four stars and an enthusiastic thumbs up, but my take on it will be offset by my wife (and 99.999% of humanity) with her lackluster three star rating and a thumb not down but sorta in the middle somewhere.

Bottom line: 7 out of 10.

Trader Joe's Pepperoni Pizza Mac & Cheese Bowl

Let's have some fun here and talk guilty pleasures.

C'mon, what's yours? I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours...

Okay, fine, me first. Let's see...fast food breakfast sandwiches. "If I Could Turn Back Time." Jackie Chan movies. Meatloaf. No, not the dinner classic, nothing to be guilty about that. The singer. No one can deliver such hokey lyrics with such powerful conviction as he. Sandy chimes in with Babysitter Club books.

I bring this up in reference to Trader Joe's Pepperoni Pizza Mac & Cheese Bowl, because, well, look at it. Looks ridiculous. Perhaps borderline genius. But really, whose name would you expect to be on such a concoction, Trader Joe's or Guy Fieri's?

Thought so. Note: Guy Fieri is decidedly not a guilty pleasure.

Anyways, take another look, this time at the product picture. Looks like the cheese and pepperoni slithered off the crust of an average run of the mill pizza and on top of a pile of mac and cheese. And that's really more or less how it tastes. There's some faint cheese flavor to the mac and cheese, and I'm sure it's actually pretty decent stuff underneath. But the pizza portion kinda overwhelms everything, with the greasy marinaraesque mozzarella making up the bulk of the flavor. Not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that. The pepperoni is pretty average and nondescript, a little wimpy in my opinion. I would have loved some thicker chunks over the skinny slices.

Mash up a freezer pizza with a box of Kraft, and that's more or less what the outcome is. That might be a slight under-evaluation, but not by much.

All that being said, I really enjoyed this more than I should have. Two classics mixed into one. There's so much comfort food vibe going on, and that's even from nuking it - baking it would have been even better, almost undoubtedly so. Sandy and I could both eat the whole tray ourselves, it's a good thing we shared.

In all, for two all time greats in one go, it's not quite Bowie-Mercury, but certainly not Bowie-Jagger either. It's a guilty pleasure, through and through, and every once in a while, is that such a bad thing? Nah. Between the two of us, Sandy and I appreciate it enough to give it a score a tad bit higher than it probably deserves. Don't judge too harshly, and dig in.

Bottom line: Trader Joe's Pepperoni Pizza Mac & Cheese Bowl: 6.5 out of 10 Golden Spoons

Trader Giotto's Misto Alla Griglia

A couple things about this product mystify me. The first is the defrosting instructions. They say to defrost from frozen at room temperature for two hours, and then to serve. I'm not sure if we just keep our home a little on the chilly side, but after two hours, these vegetables were still very much on the cold side of room temperature. Even at the two and a half hour mark, they still wanted to crunch a little from the ice crystals left within them. 

Another thing I don't get is that they recommend serving these at room temperature in the first place, rather than hot. After having tried them both ways, I still greatly prefer them heated—while Sonia preferred them as the instructions specified.

Sonia thought maybe that heating them in the microwave would be detrimental to their texture—that they might get more leathery or chewy in the microwave. And while I wasn't a fan of this product's texture in either case, I must admit the veggies, most notably the eggplant and zucchini, were slightly less chewy when not heated in the microwave. But something about eating them hot, particularly when served with pasta, made them just barely palatable. My gag reflex wanted to kick in when attempting to consume them lukewarm or cold.

The best thing about this product was the marinade of vinegar, oil, and spice, which gave the mixture a nice savory flavor and enhanced the natural flavors of the grilled vegetables. When eaten with pasta, the herby tang of the misto alla griglia spread out beyond the vegetables and served as a nice subtle dressing for our linguini noodles as well. No other sauce was needed—although we did throw in a bit of the 21 Seasoning Salute.

But still, I preferred each bite to contain very small bites of the veggies and plenty of pasta, because otherwise I found the texture unbearable.

There's always the possibility that we got a bad bag and that your eggplant and zucchini will simply melt in your mouth. We've already seen eggplant from Trader Joe's go both ways. Click here for a big eggplant win, or here for a big eggplant fail. At $3.99 for the bag, Sonia thinks it might be just as cost effective to buy and grill your own vegetables. Of course, it would be a bit more work, but grilling your own eggplant, zucchini, and peppers might be more fun than thawing this nonsense for a full day in your fridge or half a day on your counter and still not knowing if it's the right temperature. I'm pretty sure this won't be a repeat buy for us.

Three stars from Sonia. Two and a half from me.

Bottom line: 5.5 out of 10.

Trader Joe's Chocolate Sunflower Seed Drops

"Better than peanut M&M's," says Sonia.

I won't argue with that assessment.

The sunflower seeds provide a decidedly nutty flavor, and there's just the right amount of chocolate...plus, of course, a colorful candy shell on each drop. They're crunchy, addictive, and fun to play with. Makes you wonder why none of the big mainstream candy companies have offered chocolate-covered sunflower seeds yet...

We were inspired to make another short video. Please enjoy our crude attempt at stop motion animation.

Bottom line: 8 out of 10.

Trader Joe's Shaved Cheese Blend

Cheese is an absolute currency in our household. It's an easy bribe for the kiddos, and if I give them even the teensiest nibble of cheese to one of them, without them asking, their excitement rivals what mine would be if you handed me a crisp $100 bill. Pretty please with a piece of cheese....yes, that's a thing here. Just another part of the fun of having a couple kids in the 4-and-under crowd.

But man...I love cheese too. Even when I was doing hardcore paleo a few years back, it wasn't chocolate or bread or anything else I really missed. It was cheese. Good cheese of course. Don't insult me with a block of Velveeta.

Trader Joe's Shaved Cheese Blend makes the cut as good cheese, in both mine and my kiddos' eyes. It's a simple yet sophisticated mix of toscano, "unexpected" cheddar, and Parmesan. Unexpected cheddar? If the tub tells me it's in there, I kinda expect it to be....unexpected cheddar is something that as far as I can tell exists solely in the world of TJ's and is a blend of cheddar and Parmesan. So think of the whole shebang as toscano, cheddar, and a double shot of Parm.

It's sweet. It's nutty. It's sharp and dry with a small touch of creamy. There's not an overabundance of saltiness or anything, and is decidedly not all that mild. But in all, it's a very smooth, even flavor, with the small crumbles being just as scrumptious as the big flakes. It melts pretty decently as well, though it seems perhaps a touch of flavor gets lost in that process. Regardless, deeeelish.

Most mornings, I'll toss some of the shaved cheese in some eggs with kale for a filling get-up-and-goer. I'll also admit to having a few pinches here and there, and to giving my two year a spoon to eat the last few crumbs straight. She was in heaven. Aside from that, I can't imagine the blend not working with almost anything. Salads. Pasta. Mixed into homemade bread and melted on top. Mac and cheese. Chicken dishes. Mixed into burgers. All that awesome stuff. Yes.

Sandy more shrugs about it, preferring the world of feta a bit more for all those aforementioned uses. No problem here, just her preference, and it pays off as it means more for me. As long as I can pry it away from the kids. It's a major winner, and at $2.99 for a 5 ounce tub, a pretty decent value.

Bottom line: Trader Joe's Shaved Cheese Blend: 8 out of 10 Golden Spoons

Trader Joe's Vietnamese Coffee Caramels

So at this point, you must think I'm pretty daft to keep reviewing coffee items. Sure. Well, I'm not denying the fact that I'm a fool, but there's a little bit more to it than that, since I'm quite aware that most of you, like us, are sick of coffee-flavored things at Trader Joe's and have already made up your minds about most of these coffee products anyway. 

But as some of you may know, as of late, Sonia and I have been nomadic. And as we pass by Trader Joe's locations, we just buy up as many hot new items as we can at the time and try to make them last for a few weeks. During our last TJ's run, the vast majority of new products we saw were coffee-flavored. But I must point out at this juncture that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and I believe (don't quote me on this) that this will be our last coffee item review for a while. So don't touch that dial, coffee-haters.

And now that we've gotten that silly disclaimer out of the way, we can go ahead and review these Vietnamese caramels. What makes them Vietnamese, I'm still not quite sure. And there's no uplifting spiel on the side of the tub to enlighten us any further, I'm afraid. I did a little Googling into the matter, as I'm known to do from time to time, and I did find out something about "nuoc mao," which is apparently a nearly-burnt caramel sugar sauce—a cornerstone of Vietnamese cooking. But as far as I can tell, there's nothing nuoc mao-ish about these candies. 

However, the image on the front of TJ's tub did provide a clue about the Vietnamese inspiration for these candies. Apparently, it's a Vietnamese coffee press, used in making Vietnamese iced coffee, which strikes me as being akin to one of my favorites: Thai iced tea. But anyway, I think Vietnamese iced coffee is what they were going for here.

It's a sugary, milky coffee flavor that's well-balanced and works perfectly as an after dinner sweet treat. It leaves a faint coffee aftertaste in the mouth. The texture is very similar to saltwater taffy—not quite as "stretchy," but just as soft and pliable. Both these caramels and saltwater taffy contain sugar, water, butter, and salt, so even the flavor is similar. There's no ground coffee here, which is good. Real coffee might have ruined this product's smoothness. We do have "natural coffee flavor," though, which seems to work just as well.

Neither coffee nor caramels are really my thing, but I found this product to be a pleasant surprise. So did Sonia. Three and a half stars from me. Four from her.

Bottom line: 7.5 out of 10.

Trader Joe's Matcha White Chocolate Bar

The topic of "punishment meals" have been brought up before on this blog. The short version: days that us kids were being brats, my mom would make us a dinner we'd be sure to hate just to get back at us. usually it was tuna fish casserole. Blecccccccch.

Well, a punishment meal can have a punishment dessert, right?

Unfortunately, that pretty much exactly sums up how both Sandy and I feel about Trader Joe's Matcha White Chocolate Bar with Matcha Green Tea Filling. Sounded intriguing enough to plunk down $1.99. I really wish we hadn't.

First off, look at our product shot inside the wrapper. There's so much wrong with that picture. First off, it looks like that bar got runover by a dump truck. I get that shipping and transit is what it is, and stuff happens, but seriously? That's a bit much. Then the colors...ugh. Maybe I'm jsut much too basic, but chocolate is not supposed to be that color. It doesn't even look appetizing. Then there's that filling, oozing out everywhere, looking like little puddles of melted green Army guys. Appeal factor definitely went down a few notches there.

A lot of that can be forgiven if tasted good...no. No. No. Look, kudos for effort, I guess, but swing a miss here. The chocolate portion is actually decent enough, decidedly on the sweeter side, with a hint or two of green tea mixed in. Or maybe that's its that greenness playing tricks on me. Regardless, it's not the problem. It's the filling. Very strong green tea flavor. Very herbaceous. You could have told me it was spinach jelly and I would have believed you. And it alternately doesn't jive that well with the rest of the chocolate casing while also in conjunction with that chocolate tasting like way too much green tea.

Dark chocolate with the green tea filling might have worked. Green tea white chocolate with a regular chocolate filling would have worked. Or heck, even like a berry filling of some type with that green cocoa concoction. But as is? Too much...and I like green tea. So does Sandy.

Check here for the nutritional stats and ingredients...we neglected to get a pic before trashing the box. "Good," Sandy said. "It's awful and no one should eat it anyways." She's going with a 1 for the inspiration, but, man, that execution...ugh. I gave it a second try right before writing it and really could not think of anything all that positive to say. Candy so bad it gets thrown out in my house? Must be pretty awful.

Bottom line: Trader Joe's Matcha White Chocolate Bar: 2 out of 10 Golden Spoons

Trader Joe's Vienna Coffee Meringues

These things are cavities just waiting to happen. 

There's something chalky about the texture that makes biting into these meringues like the dental equivalent of nails on a chalkboard for me. Due to their brittleness, many of the cookies were broken before we even opened the tub. They generally disintegrate into a chunky tan powder upon first bite, and they leave behind a tacky residue on fingers and lips. 

The parts of the meringues that do make it into your mouth are somewhat crunchy, but since they consist of mostly sugar and egg whites, they have a melt-in-your-mouth quality that's fairly pleasant. Their flavor is that of a sugar-sweetened sweetness with a bit more candied sugary sugar on top. There's a hint of coffee in there somewhere, too. And normally, I think we'd want the coffee flavor to come through a tad more, except that we're a bit coffee'd out right now.

We're well aware of Trader Joe's Vanilla Meringue Cookies, the predecessor to this coffee variety—one product that's been in that "After Heating Up These Dinners You'll Need To Gorge Yourself On Lots Of Candy And Cookies" aisle for years, and yet somehow has eluded our sights on this blog. A reader mentioned that these are very much like those, except for the faint coffee flavor, of course.

Sonia appreciates their visual appeal more than their flavor or texture. She says, "They're pretty, but they're not very tasty." She also likes the label on the packaging. How very graphic designery of her.

For that reason, they would be nice for a party or something like that where a bunch of people would just have one or two and then move along to graze on another snack. I can't see these being gobbled down by the dozen by very many people, but usually when I make claims like that, I turn out to be wrong. So who knows? These weren't Sonia's favorite, and they're definitely not mine, but if you want to sing their praises in the comments below, be our guest.

Two stars from me. Two and a half from Sonia.

Bottom line: 4.5 out of 10.

Trader Joe's Southwestern Chopped Salad

It wasn't until sitting down right now to type this review that I realized that the little "look in window" on the salad bag was shaped like a cowboy boot.

Cowboys. Eating salad. Mmmmkay. Not exactly what comes to mind.

But I guess if cowboys can eat chunky salsa and even chunkier chocolate bars, well, there may be room for salad. After all, they may have a soft spot for veggie burgers, of all things.

On to the salad. It's a darn good one. With one major caveat: You gotta like cilantro - a lot. Because that's really what every single bite tasted like - sharp, biting cilantro, accentuated even a bit further by green onion. I happen to enjoy cilantro to a moderate degree, and I was beginning to get close to a breaking point. Really, a fleshy, sweet addition - think grape tomato or even roasted corn - would have helped keep it all in check.

But everything else is pretty spot on. Good, crisp greens. Mild cotija cheese. The little baggie of mix-in tortilla strips and pumpkin seeds (I hate the word pepitas, call them what they are) added good texture and crunch with a little saltiness in there. And of course, the dressing. I'm not a huge salad dressing guy, Sandy's not all that into avocados, but we both loved it. There's a slight heat to it, so it's a bit like a soupier medium guacamole, which works really well with the rest of the salad components.

If only so much of the sald weren't drowned out by those ubiquitous cilantro sprigs.

We ate our salad with some grilled chicken strips, which made a pretty fulfilling meal. Some beef or grilled steak strips would another great addition, or even some tofu or black beans for a little protein. Would also recommend tomatoes and/or corn depending on your tastes. So it's not quite a "complete salad" kit in my estimation, but it'll get you most of the way there with a little room for customization to boot. Not bad for $3.99.

Bottom line: Trader Joe's Southwestern Chopped Salad: 7.5 out of 10 Golden Spoons.