It's a stretch to call these "cookies," if you ask me. Which they didn't.
But a cookie by any other name would taste as sweet. The outside is like a waffle cone rolled up tight. The inside is a vanilla cream. It's a nice combination--delicate but crunchy, not overpoweringly sugary.
Will I buy it again?
No. I enjoyed them, but not enough to choose them over my favorites.
I've eaten so many Nabisco Nilla Wafers in my life that they should have given me, like, 50% stock ownership in the company by now. This has given me a extremely entrenched idea of what a vanilla wafer should taste like. And Trader Joe's has missed the mark completely.
I can't put my finger on what's wrong here, but these struck me as not just "not quite what I was expecting" but positively distasteful. My reaction was so strong that I thought I might just be having an off day, so I put the bag aside for a couple of weeks. Last night I came back for a second try--and had exactly the same opinion. I seriously dislike them. I had two and couldn't stand the thought of a third.
Will I buy it again?
No. This is one that's going back to the store for a refund.
This is basically your standard vanilla/chocolate-chip ice cream, except that the chips are bits of fudge. Even in frozen ice cream, they stay softer than traditional chocolate chips, which is a nice textural surprise.
Will I buy it again?
I doubt it. I liked it just fine, but not enough to be a top choice.
This is obviously the same basic concept as the Chocolate Ganache version discussed here a few days ago. I was surprised to find that I liked this better, which usually isn't the case when comparing a vanilla and chocolate pair of options. This was mainly because of the excellent frosting, which is rich with that intriguing vanilla bean flavor. The underlying cake is merely so-so.
Will I buy it again?
No. It's more interesting than the chocolate, but still not good enough to beat what I would make for myself.
If I just dip my spoon in and eat this, I like it. But if I compare it with what I expected it to be from the product name, description, and package images, I'm disappointed.
The ice cream doesn't strike me as a "super premium"--not by a long shot. Neither the chocolate nor the vanilla is particularly rich in flavor.
But the most disappointing thing is the lack of caramel, which was what I was most looking forward to--the feature that I thought would set this apart from other chocolate/vanilla combos. I've had two servings of three scoops each, and in only two or three bites was there enough caramel for me to be able to detect its presence, visually and/or by taste.
It appears that I am not alone in this criticism. The good folks at the "What's Good at Trader Joe's" blog described the same problem nearly six years ago. The fact that TJ's has done nothing to improve the product since then goes to show you the immense influence we bloggers have over the company....
First, it's harder to make than most modern cake mixes, requiring milk, eggs, and butter. Second, it ended up with some grittiness--maybe clusters of sugar granules? I'm not sure what they were, but they were unpleasant. Third, it just wasn't especially vanilla-y, and if there's anything special about the "Madagascar Bourbon Vanilla," I couldn't detect it.
I ate about a third of the resulting cake, and threw the rest away. It just wasn't good enough to use my dietary sweets allotment on.
I had seen this in the Trader Joe's cheese section many times, but I always passed it by. I thought it looked too weird to enjoy. Even after I bought it, it sat uneaten in my refrigerator for about three weeks, because I was so leery of its strangeness that night after night I saw it sitting there, but picked something else for my nighttime snack, telling myself that I'd get to the weird cheese "tomorrow."
But I had to try it because of having made a promise. I recently gained two new neighbors in the apartment next to mine. When they learned of my odd TJ's blogging hobby, one of them, Kendra Warren, told me this was her favorite TJ's thing, and said I had to try it, and I promised that I would. That's why I bought it, and that's why backing out on the taste test wasn't an option, despite my trepidations. Besides, how bad could it be? I like cheese, I like vanilla, and I like blueberries.
So I finally got to it. Verdict: It's just as peculiar as I had anticipated. Vanilla and blueberry are not flavors that my tongue expects when I tell it that a piece of cheese is incoming.
The main problem I have with this product is that it's hard to tell it's cheese. The blueberries so dominate the flavor that it's hard for me to tell that anything else is there. Even when I carefully cut around them to try some blueberry-free cheese, I tasted mostly vanilla (which seems to be blended into the cheese, not just added to the surface). If Clara Peller were doing a TV commercial, she'd bark, "Where's the cheese?"
Also, this is the messiest cheese I think I've ever tried. I found no way to attack it that didn't involve getting most of my fingers sticky and stained blue. It's about as soft as cheese can be without actually flowing, so it's hard to slice.
Will I buy it again?
No. I enjoyed eating it--much more than I had thought I would, in fact. But that's because I like blueberries (in this case, with a little vanilla added in), not because I like it as cheese. So if I want blueberries, I'll eat some blueberries. If I want cheese, I'll select something else. Sorry, Kendra! De gustibus non est disputandum. Speaking of my friend Kendra, a little plugging is in order. She is a fine musician and model, and you should seek out/listen to/hire her as appropriate. Here's a fun music video she did, singing the true story of her dad burning down the mountain on which the family home sat:
This is not great ice cream. But then again, you wouldn't expect it to be, when you read that it has 80% less fat than TJ's premium vanilla ice cream. The flavor is decent, but the texture is missing all that richness. It reminds me of the "ice milk" that was kind of a big thing back in the 1970s and 1980s.
Still, if you put some sort of good topping on it, it's certainly passable. I suppose there may come a day when a cardiologist tells me that I have to drastically cut back on my total fat intake, in which case a product like this will probably seem like the best I can allow myself, and I'll be happy to have it.
The cherry-chocolate chip "Soy Creamy" blew me away with how good it was. So I had high expectations for its plainer shelfmate in vanilla--maybe higher than was realistic. Without cherry and chocolate flavors to hide behind, it was harder to disguise the non-dairy nature of this one.
That is not to say that it's bad. It isn't. It's just not "must eat all of it right now" good. It's sort of average vanilla ice cream. A really great, premium French vanilla ice cream can stand on its own. More mundane vanilla ice creams really need something to tart them up--fruit, a glaze, some chocolate syrup, or whatever. This falls into the latter category. There's nothing particularly wrong with it, but also nothing particularly exciting about it.
Will I buy it again?
No. As I write this, the container has been sitting half-eaten in my freezer for two weeks, which suggests my lack of enthusiasm for it.
I had never noticed or heard of these until recently when somebody on Twitter posted a photo and said that they taste just like the marshmallow bits in Lucky Charms cereal.
Well! I have eaten a ton of Lucky Charms in my life, and I always felt that eating the cereal part was the price you had to pay in order to get to eat the yummy marshmallow bits. So if Trader Joe's was selling something that was like a giant Lucky Charms marshmallow piece, Ima be all over that.
You know what? That woman on Twitter was right. These really do taste a lot like the marshmallow bits from Lucky Charms--so much so that it's hard to think of anything else when eating them.
But they're just too much of a good thing. I find that I quickly get sated of that taste. It feels like a struggle to finish just one of these giant things. The label says that a serving size is four, which seems impossible to me. I like them--but nowhere near that much.
Will I buy it again?
It was fun and interesting to try them once, but that's plenty for this lifetime.
Update
I had about six of these. I think I had two the first night, then one per night for the next few days. And that was the end of it. I liked each one less than the one before, and finally gave up on them entirely. They went back to the store for a refund.
Growing up, we had Nabisco's Nilla Wafers around the house frequently. Sometimes there was a competing brand (Keebler, maybe?), but it didn't have a distinctive, memorable product name. So Nilla Wafers has, for something like 50 years, been my Platonic ideal of a vanilla wafer. This Trader Joe's contender is clearly quite different, as you can see at a glance. Can it knock the king off of his throne?
No.
Now, I'll admit that if I had come to the comparison as a vanilla wafer virgin, I might well choose TJ's. There is a distinct air of quality about them.
But my main stumbling block is that they're very soft, whereas I've come to expect vanilla wafers to be crispy. Oddly, I started to like the TJ's cookies a little better after the container had been sitting on my counter for a few weeks, and they dried out some, simply because they began to more closely resemble the texture I'm accustomed to.
As a secondary issue, they're less vanilla-y than Nilla Wafers. Admittedly, this is probably because TJ's uses actual vanilla beans, while Nabisco uses what they will only disclose as "natural and artificial flavors." They can cram a helluva lot of artificial vanilla flavor in--and I like it. Maybe I shouldn't, but I do.
I readily concede that my preference here may be akin to a bumpkin saying, "Yeah, I think Wal-Mart wine in a box is way tastier than that fancy-schmancy French shit." But that's my opinion and I'm sticking to it.
Will I buy it again?
No. In fact, after I had eaten maybe a third of the tub, they sat on my counter for a few weeks. I kept picking other snacks over them. I finally realized that that meant that I really didn't want to eat any more of them, so after one more sampling (as mentioned above), they went back to the store for a refund.
