Trader Joe's Raspberry Mousse Cakes

These are basically the same as the Chocolate Mousse Pumpkins, except in raspberry instead of chocolate. They're not as good. Not terrible, by any stretch of the imagination--just not as good. And my recollection is that the chocolate had a higher ratio of mousse to cake, though I might be remembering incorrectly.


Will I buy it again? 

No.

Trader Joe's Raspberry Oat Square

For a product the name of which starts with "raspberry," this thing is unbelievably stingy on the raspberry. It's a very thin layer. The effect is like eating baked oats, with an occasional hint of raspberry buried somewhere deep within. Pathetic.


Will I buy it again? 

No.

Trader Joe's Organic Dark Chocolate PB&J Minis

I had a weird experience with these candies. I first tried them after dinner with Nina, and felt thoroughly meh about them. A week passed, and I ate the last three as part of a late-night snack alone, and quite liked them. I have some theories about these two different reactions, but they're all about my internal state of mind and have nothing to do with the product, so I'll spare you.

I've never cared for anything combining chocolate and peanut butter. And on first tasting, I thought, "Yep, more of that wrongness." But on second trial, I instead got a stronger sense of the raspberry filling, which oddly seemed to sort of buffer the clash between the chocolate and peanut butter--like The Dude's rug tying the room together in "The Big Lebowski." This completely surprised me.

Nina didn't like these. She thought the components weren't well-balanced, and the chocolate tasted cheap. She also noticed the strange portion numbers in the labeling: 3 pieces to a portion, 8 in the bag, contents "about 2 1/2" servings. So why not put 9 in the bag to make a whole number of servings? Well, Trader Joe's, what have you got to say for yourself on this excellent question?


Will I buy it again? 

No. Even on my more favorable second impression, they don't rise anywhere close to the level of favorite chocolates.

Trader Joe's 8 Mini Raspberry Pastries

I liked these. The dough part was flavorful and flaky. The filling was a delightful burst of raspberriness.

However. (1) A couple of them came out of the oven with some unpleasant sogginess to them. (2) They leave behind parts of themselves on whatever surface they're baked on. I was glad I followed the package directions to line the cookie sheet with foil, so I could just throw it away rather than scrape and scrub the residue off. (3) Four of the eight were glommed together in a nasty iceball in the bag, and it was a pain to break them apart before heating. (4) It costs a lot for not very much dessert. They're tiny things.


Will I buy it again? 

No.

Trader Joe's Macaron Aux Framboises--Raspberry Macaron Cake

Nina spotted and purchased this recently, and served it for our dessert last night when I was at her house for dinner. I had never noticed it before.

It is quite excellent.

No preparation is required, except to thaw it for 45 minutes. With that much time, ours was still very cold, and the cream filling still had the texture of ice cream. Nina and I both liked that, but it seems not to be what the manufacture intends. Maybe next time we'll experiment with leaving it longer before eating.

I'm not a big fan of almonds or almond flavor, but despite the "almond 'biscuit'" language on the box, I didn't find it objectionable at all.

The raspberries were perfect--plump and flavorful and sweet. The cream filling was appropriately decadent.

The package says it serves three. That's true, as long as you're willing to leave those three people wanting more.

As Nina pointed out, you could serve this to guests, claim that you made it yourself, and nobody would be the wiser. I probably can't pull that off with her now, but you could fool your friends into thinking you've become a fine pastry chef.


Will I buy it again? 

Yes. It's thoroughly delicious.

Trader Joe's Raspberry Chevre

This has the same basic problem as the blueberry vanilla chevre: Though the fruit flavor is nice, it totally overwhelms the cheese, and the stuff ends up tasting like a fruit spread rather than like a cheese with an added accent flavor.


Will I buy it again? 

No.

Trader Joe's Sparkling Raspberry Lime Spring Water

This has a surprisingly strong raspberry flavor. Surprising, that is, based on my experience of other sparkling waters, which tend to be quite lightly flavored. The heavier dosing of flavor here produces an unusual sensation of sweetness, even though it contains zero sugars and zero calories. It's also more heavily carbonated than any other such product I've had before--right up there with sugary sodas.

The claimed lime, however, is absent from the flavor profile.


Will I buy it again? 

I did like it, but it's just not a product category for which I have much use. When I want water, I want just water. When I want soda, I want soda. This is sort of halfway between, and I think I would never pick it over the two things it's sorta trying to be.

Driscoll's Sunshine Raspberries

Just like regular red raspberries, except kind of yellowish in color. Nothing wrong with them, but I have a hard time seeing the point, unless it's just to add some variety to the appearance of a fruit plate.


Will I buy it again? 

No.

Trader Joe's Apple Raspberry Dried Fruit Bar

This is just like the apple-strawberry version, but with raspberry.

Because of that, I should like it better; raspberry beats strawberry as a general rule. But for reasons I can't articulate, I thought it wasn't quite as good. Close, though.


Will I buy it again? 

Yes. I'll be happy to keep both on hand.

Trader Joe's Raspberry Tart

I'm not sure what makes this a "tart" instead of a "tarte," or even just a "pie." But it's raspberry, so it must be good, right?

I admit my bias: I love raspberries. So I was predisposed to like this--and I did. I ate a third of it on each of three consecutive evenings. Nina didn't even get a bite.


Will I buy it again? 

Yes. Next time I'll give Nina a little itty-bitty sliver before I devour the rest, because I'm generous like that.

Trader Joe's Raspberry Cranberry Spritzer

This is, obviously, much like the blackberry spritzer reviewed yesterday, except raspberry-cranberry.

I was very surprised to find that I didn't like it as much. Normally, either straight raspberry or a cran/rasp anything will be my hands-down preference over a blackberry anything. Not so here. It doesn't taste as genuinely fruity. It seems more like soda, with fruit flavors instead of real juice, even though the label says otherwise. I have no idea why this might be so. And, of course, YMMV.


Will I buy it again? 

I'm on my second bottle, because this outcome was so atypical for me that I wanted a second shot at seeing whether it was real. It is. So no, I don't think I will buy it again.

Trader Joe's Tarte Aux Fruits--Mixed Berry Tarte

It was with a heavy heart that I learned that Trader Joe's was discontinuing its Raspberry Tarte, which both Nina and I thought might well be the single best product in the whole store.

Not too much later, though, this quasi-replacement showed up. It's not quite as good as the original, but it's still great. You get a medley of raspberries, blueberries, and red currants, instead of all raspberries. The crust is more prone to getting soggy if not eaten in its entirety soon after thawing. But those flaws aside, the berries are superb, and the glaze that holds them together seems unchanged from the old version.

My conclusion is that this is about 90% as good as the original. That makes it still of sufficient quality to join the Top Ten list.


Will I buy it again? 

Shhhhh. Don't tell anyone, but I've already had four of them.

Trader Joe's Organic Raspberry Fruit Spread

This is very pleasant stuff. And no wonder--the ingredients are just raspberries, grape juice concentrate as a sweetener, pectin, and ascorbic and citric acids.

Predictably, it works anywhere you might usually use raspberry jam. It tastes more natural, less sweet than jam.


Will I buy it again? 

Probably not. Part of that is because it's a lot more expensive than jam. That, at least, is defensible. The other part of the reason isn't, really: I'm a barbarian. I was raised on cheap fruit jam, and still like it. Though I could sense that this spread was how such a product ought to taste, I'm still so used to the stuff that's about half added sugar that that's what I want. I'm sorry.

Trader Joe's Organic Reduced Sugar Raspberry Preserves

I was wary of this stuff, because sugar is the essence of jam/preserves, so 40% less of it seems like enough of a reduction to render the result, well, icky.

I was wrong. It's almost as good as regular raspberry preserves. If you fed it to me without telling me what was different about it, I think I would notice that it was a little less sweet than I was used to, but I would never guess that the sugar reduction was as high as 40%. It's actually kind of amazing that they can get that much sugar out and still have the product be this good.


Will I buy it again? 

It's not going to become my go-to spread for toast in the morning. But if I really needed to cut calories and/or sugar from my diet, then yeah, this would definitely become my first choice. I hope that day never comes, but if it does, I'll be happy to have this product around.

Trader Joe's Raspberries (frozen)

As much as I like berry medleys, sometimes I just want the best part of those medleys, which is the raspberries. Fortunately, Trader Joe's accommodates my desire with this product--plain, unadorned, frozen raspberries. No sugar, no sauce. The official list of ingredients on the back of the package says, "Raspberries." Full stop. This is as it should be. You just pour some out into a bowl, let them thaw for 45 to 60 minutes, then nom on them.

Of course, fresh would be better. But fresh raspberries are the very definition of "perishable." It's rare that I have them when I get hit with the jones for berries. So having a package like this in reserve in the freezer meets the need nicely.

It's possible that I've seen a similar product in other stores, but if so, I don't remember it. These are consistently good enough--and cheap enough--that I feel no need to search out competitors for comparison.


Will I buy it again? 

Of course.

Trader Joe's Cranberry Raspberry

This is better than most of TJ's big-jug juice blends. It retains enough of the tartness of the cranberry, even though the raspberry dominates, in a bit of a surprise move. The blend is stoked with those old non-favorite sweeteners, apple and white grape juice, but the result isn't as over-the-top sweet as TJ's usually puts out. In fact, it's quite pleasant--as good as or better than any other cranberry-raspberry juice blend I've had.


Will I buy it again? 

Yep.

Spindrift Seltzer--Raspberry

I liked the grapefruit version of this enough that it was a no-brainer to try the raspberry, since I like everything raspberry. (Well, almost everything raspberry.)

But this is not as good. It has kind of a hint of raspberry, but it needs more. Or possibly the problem is that I associated raspberry with sweetness, and this is not sweet. (The grapefruit would escape condemnation on this theory, because my life experience does not lead me to expect sweetness with grapefruit.) I didn't mind it, but I wouldn't seek it out.


Will I buy it again? 

No. I would never buy this when I could instead have the much better grapefruit seltzer.

Trader Joe's Raspberry Sorbet

Nina bought this. I ate some at her house, but forgot to take a picture of it, so took this one in the store.

I thought it was quite good, but not spectacular. Put another way, it's what I would expect from store-bought sorbet, but not as good as I expected Trader Joe's to make it, after falling in love with some of their other frozen desserts.


Will I buy it again? 

Yes.

Nina's View

I keep going to Trader Joe's and looking for the pomegranate sorbet [Bob notes: sherbet] and not finding it. I bought this because what could go wrong? And nothing did, it was fine. But it was not POMEGRANATE SORBET.

Last time I went to TJ's not only did they not have the aforemention Po. Me. Gran. Ate. sorbet, they didn't have ANY sorbet.

End times, people. End times.

Trader Joe's Dark Chocolate Baton--Raspberry

Chocolate and raspberry make a fabulous combination--at least in theory. In practice, it doesn't always work out so well.

Here the chocolate is lovely. It's the raspberry component that's the problem. First, there's not enough of it. Second, it comes in the form of actual raspberry seeds embedded in the chocolate, which are not necessarily pleasant.

I realize that that complaint carries shades of Woody Allen in "Annie Hall":

There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions."

My point, though, is that you can get great raspberry flavor--as much as you care to inject--without using raspberry seeds. If I want raspberry seeds stuck in my teeth, I'll eat some raspberries, not some chocolate.


Will I buy it again? 

No.

Nina's View

Seeds. In the teeth. GAH! No no no no no. Why would you emphasize the absolutely most annoying thing about raspberries if you didn't have to? I'll concede the dark chocolate is nice. But not at the price of having to deal with seeds wedged in the teeth.

What a terrible, terrible choice.

Trader Joe's Blueberry Raspberry Oat Bran Muffins

This was a completely impulse purchase at the store yesterday. Muffins are not a staple of my diet, I didn't have them on my shopping list, and I didn't even know what kind of muffins TJ's carries. But I saw them, thought they looked good, and took them home. I had one right after I got home, another this morning for breakfast.

I like them, even though they don't fit very well with my mental image of what muffins are supposed to be. I think of muffins as light, while these are dense, heavy, substantial, and chewy. But I didn't mind. They're moist and delicious.

They're not perfect. The paper cup is really difficult to remove intact; I had to dig out a bunch of small pieces that tore off, leaving a pock-marked muffin behind. They're unusually sticky. I'd up the number of berries by about 50% if it were up to me. But still, the overall eating experience was strongly more positive than negative.


Will I buy it again? 

Next time the muffin impulse hits me, I hope I find them again.