Pepperidge Farm Swirl Bread: Caramel Apple

After enjoying the Strawberry Banana flavor so much, when I saw the Caramel Apple flavor on the shelf next to it, apples being another of my favorite fruits, I was compelled to try it. The smell was strong and apple-y. Unfortunately, the taste was not.

I was frankly disappointed. I referenced the strawberry banana as "subtle;" here, the subtlety is enough that it can be hard to taste the apple at all! Plus, I have no idea if there was any caramel in there, period. The texture seemed to have little apple-like chunks in the slices; honestly, the novelty was mostly in the aroma and texture. The flavor didn't scream "caramel apple" to me at all.

To be fair, it could always be that my taste buds were overwhelmed by something (i.e. apple cider), but I'm pretty sure I had a slice without drinking anything that flavorful beforehand and had a similar effect. Maybe my tastebuds just got inured to apple?

It seems that, for fall, Pepperidge Farm introduced this flavor as well as a Pumpkin Spice flavor, which I did not see with this one, interestingly enough (maybe I was distracted by "ooh, Caramel Apple!"). Hopefully I'm wrong about my first impressions on this bread, and hopefully Pumpkin Spice is good too; I really like these creative Swirl breads.

Nonni's Triple Milk Chocolate Biscotti

Chocolate Biscotti + 110cal.

I'll admit it, the chocolate high for relatively few calories (considering some of the decadent things one can get) is what drew me in. What took me so long to try one was a trick of my own eyes: when I took the tray of long biscotti out of the box, I only counted four, magically neglecting to count the second four behind them.

The biscotti are hard, as to be expected. They are not horribly hard, but give some resistance before breaking -- they are not completely brittle, either. The hardness of the biscotti is offset by drizzled chocolate -- a zigzag on top and a coating on the bottom. These help the texture feel softer without the aid of milk or coffee (which are common complements to biscotti).

At 880--I mean, 110 calories, these four-inch biscotti are quite a treat. Those 110 may soon become 880 despite the barrier of individual wrappers.

Wrigley 5 Gum: Vortex

Wrigley's 5 Gum in Vortex is a green-apple flavor. When you open the pack, it hits you in the face with sour green apple scent. It made me think of a Jolly Rancher, to be honest.

The flavor tastes almost as it smells only a bit less intense. You do get the sour/fruity Jolly Rancher feel, but it is a bit underwhelming. Nevertheless, it's not bad. A bit of "juicy green apple" flavor as the box promises and some chewing. The stick was nice and soft, too.

Not my favorite flavor but I've been able to munch on it for a bit, which says something.

Mentos UP2U Gum: Striped Red Strawberry/Starmint

Just in time for July 4th I'm posting my thoughts on the patriotically themed flavors of UP2U gum. The package is American Flag-y, and even the flavors are patriotic -- STRIPED Red Strawberry and STARmint. Get it? Stars and stripes?

The Starmint flavor is probably one of my favorite minty flavors so far. I am terrible at identifying mints, so I have no idea if it's a blend of mints or what, but I can say that it's a very light and fresh mint flavor -- very nice and refreshing.

Like the other non-mint flavors I've had (aka Berry Watermelon and...Berry Watermelon), the Striped Red Strawberry does have a weird minty undertone to it. But the flavor is also very definitely strawberryesque, and nicely so. What I REALLY liked about this was the smell -- talk about getting a good smack of strawberry right in the nose (I like strawberry smells)!

Mentos UP2U Gum: Berry Watermelon/Fresh Mint

The Fresh mint starts off nice and sweet -- the way fresh would be expected. At times, though, it gets some bitter/sour notes, or it did with the first few pieces I tasted. (This may also be because I was simply trying the gum, rather than having a piece after food, so the neutralizing effect of the mint was overstated.)

I'm not sure how much I like the Berry Watermelon. It's got a nice sweetness to it, but at the same time, while you're feeling the berry tang and everything, there's a minty undertone that is a little odd considering this is a berry and watermelon flavor. It's kind of like the Fresh Mint is an undertone and it's a bit strange. Besides that, though, the gum is really succulent-feeling and sweet and nice.

Marukawa Fusen Bubble Gum

This Japanese gum comes in little cardboard boxes. Inside are four relatively soft gumballs -- there IS a 'shell' but it's more like the gum's been firmed up a bit than covered by a hard shell.

The flavors I've seen are Orange, Strawberry, Melon, and Grape, though the Internet tells me there are others. These flavors come across as their respective fruits at their sweetest -- they aren't overly artificial. For example, the Orange flavor tastes like you're chewing a segment of orange...which is great authenticity-wise (I, personally, am not overly fond of oranges).

If you simply want something to chew on, one ball will suffice. It might feel like a little less gum than you are used to, but it's chewable. Two will be a little over what you're used to.

However, if you want to use it as bubble gum, I suggest using all four balls at once. It may sound like a lot, but with any less the gum is too thin to stretch properly for bubble-blowing.

Morinaga Hi-Chew

The chews start out rather firm, which may contribute to the fact that they are a supple sort of chewy. Kind of like gum that doesn't get too too mushy -- though, of course, less stretchy, since this is intended to be consumed rather than just chewed.

The colors of the chews differ from flavor to flavor. Often, they are pale and dual-colored. For example, the strawberry flavor is white on the edges with a pink middle, and that of the peach is white around...well...a peach color.


The flavor of the chew is light but strong. Quite sweet, but not the overly candy sweet. It's like the natural fruit-sweet noticeably, but not drastically, amplified.

They come in flavors other than strawberry and peach, including mango and melon. (The picture is mango.)

Kasugai Gummies

Japanese gummies are typical anime convention fare. They're little, individual wrapped, quarter-sized gummies made with various flavors. Depending on the flavor, I've seen them as both circle and heart-shaped. The gummies are firm, so when you bite down on them it's notably thicker than jello, but they're smooth, too, so if you don't bite down immediately they'll slide around in your mouth. They're surprisingly heavy for their small size; I think I just ate two servings (6 of these things) and it feels like a gummy brick is in my stomach. (You'd think I'd know better by now.)

They come in a lot of flavors; I haven't had the chance to try every flavor out there, but I have had a good number, like melon, grape, muscat grape (yes these are two different flavors), strawberry, and apple. I've even seen a ramune flavored one! I tasted it and thought I tasted a tang like a soda (ramune is a carbonated beverage known for being served in bottles stoppered with marbles), but thinking about it now, the tang was probably a soft hint of the lemon-lime flavor that is the "original" ramune soda flavor.

The intensity of flavor differs depending on which type you're having, and the feeling of the "natural" or "candy" version of said flavors differ as well. For example, the strawberry gummies are light and candylike, while the apple gummies are extremely intense in their flavor and taste like an incredibly potent apple cider.

Superior Cake Products Mini Black and White Cookies

I'm usually not that fond of black and white cookies. The half side of chocolate is usually the best part, and then there's the rest of the cookie to slog through.

Not so with these cookies.

For one, they're small, so while there's less chocolate to enjoy, it's not like you're going through a giant mound of the cookie beneath.

For another, these cookies were amazingly moist for being in a box -- the cookie part was so good, not only did I not mind it, that was a good part of what kept me coming back for another!

It could just be my bad luck in encountering black and whites over the years, but these definitely rank as the best I've had so far.

Philadelphia Dark Chocolate Indulgence

This is basically a chocolate cream cheese. Sometimes it felt like cocoa powder mixed into creamcheese, only, with minimal balancing to the bitterness. Maybe that was the cream cheese giving its part to the flavor and diverting it from pure chocolate taste. It was good, though -- I mean, come on, chocolate and cream cheese, how can this go wrong?!

Also comes in milk and white chocolate; I am sorely tempted to try these out as well.

Juicy Fruit Juicy Secret

It's certainly got a juicy feel to it when you first start chewing, but then the flavor mellows out pretty quickly and the gum loses the softness it originally had. The juiciness is sadly fleeting.

Ben and Jerry's Coconut Seven Layer Bar

I happened upon a scoop shop while I was on a trip to Boston. The combination of coconut ice cream with fudge, walnuts, and butterscotch sounded amazing, and it is currently scoop shop only, so I caved and snapped it up. (Somehow I managed to refrain from also buying every other flavor available, scoop shop specific or not -- I'm a HUGE fan of Ben and Jerry's.) It's been a while, so I don't remember it in detail, but I do remember eating it was an amazing experience. Not sure if I tasted the walnuts all that much, but I distinctly remember the butterscotch being very caramelly to me (in a good way). And the coconuttiness of the ice cream. Oh man. Yum.

Fruit2O and Hint Waters

Recently I've discovered that I can actually stomach flavored water. It used to be that I couldn't take the feeling of water with flavor, but I've found these are enough to my taste that I can handle them. I'm not sure if it's that they're 'gentler' than whatever I'd tried before or if it's my palate changing, but it has happened.

• Hint Premium Essence Water

As you can probably guess from the picture I chose, I tried the watermelon version of this stuff. It was pretty good. It helped that watermelon is a light flavor, because the overwhelming flavor is what stops me when I'm drinking something thirstily and expecting something water (i.e. flavored waters). The hint was light and came across as...well...a hint of watermelon. Just as you'd kinda expect.

• Fruit2O

 
 Like the Hint, this was surprisingly nice and light flavoring, though it was definitely more intense. Again, though, this could relate to the flavor choices -- the Fruit2O I came across didn't have a watermelon flavor, so I can't do a direct comparison; the flavors I had instead were Strawberry, which is nice and light while having a sweet, strawberry punch to it, and Grape, which was slightly reminiscent of the just-too-sweet medicine grape, but not quite. It wasn't bad, though, just a little oddly sweet. (but then, I found the grape medicines among the most tolerable as a kid.)

Blueberry Muffin Poptarts

These Poptarts are, well, Poptarts. You get what you expect -- they're not the next gourmet treat. But, for what they are, they're quite good.

The poptart itself is cute, with white icing and blue and tan specks mimicking the idea of a blueberry muffin.It tasted and felt like a routine Poptart, with either the filling or the icing (likely the filling, for it seemed much less present than the latter) giving a hint of blueberry.

Once you've taken a bite or few, be sure to savor the flavor. It may not seem like that much at first, but I was able to get to a point where the blueberry and the poptart pastry flavors combined and gave a nice, Poptart-ized imitation of a muffin.

Pepperidge Farm Swirl Bread: Strawberry Banana

Considering I like the regular cinnamon version of this bread AND it was strawberry banana, I had to try it. It was quite good. There is still cinnamon in the bread, which is sliced thick and rather moist, mostly due to the swirls and bits of strawberry and banana in the bread. The strawberry banana felt rather subtle to me, sweet but balanced with the cinnamon. It really is like the regular bread only with strawberry and banana, so if you like both...chances are you'll like this.

Body Armor SuperDrink: Strawberry Banana Guava

I've been drooling over this bottle every time I pass. It's all pretty and pink with a nice macro of a ripe red strawberry, yellow bananas, and the adorable green-rimmed pink of what I'm assuming is guava (I should get myself one if they're really like that). Plus, I love anything strawberry banana, I think I mentioned that in a few posts; I remember specifically in my ramblings about Chobani Yogurt and Tropical Starburst.

It was very powerful on the strawberry banana - the combination hit hard. I don't know where the guava went, though, to be honest, I don't know if guava is a flavor I would recognize. The texture was nice. I thought it was going to be watery and odd because the drink is pretty transparent, but it felt more like I was drinking a thinned-out smoothie. Not an exceptionally watered down one, just one that had lost the edge to its thickness. It definitely felt more smoothie-like than I expected.

Dora3 Croissants with Cocoa Creme

Considering I got these for a few bucks because someone decided to shop while hungry, I wasn't expecting them to be AMAZING. They were actually pretty good, though. The cream was scanty, but it was good, and the pastry itself was enjoyable. They flavored it with lemon, though, as seems to be common in pastries and desserts everywhere. If you like lemon flavoring, then it should be fine.

Trident Layers Sweet Cherry and Island Lime

I've probably mentioned it a thousand times, I'm a sucker for the word "new." That, plus the sudden craving for gum I had, led to the purchase of a few packs, one of them being these.

I'm surprised. For all my hesitation about this flavor, being that one of my most common flavor preferences is "NOT citrus," I really like this gum. If the gum flavor actually is layered, that might explain why, because the cherry comes to counteract/balance out/fill out the lime. And, the lime flavor isn't TOO intense. You can definitely taste it, but at the same time, there's the sweetness of cherry so you're not overloaded.

In addition to that, I love the texture of this gum! It comes in a stick that's maybe half the size of your average "stick of gum," with a lot of the equivalence coming from how thick the stick is (because of the layers). Unlike some other gums I've had, this stays remarkably pliable for me for a while.

Starbucks Doubleshot Energy+Coffee Mocha and White Chocolate

Starbucks Doubleshots. Actually, these are Starbucks Doubleshots + Energy, officially -- rather than the smaller cans, which are listed as the pure 'Doubleshots', this is a mixture of coffee and an energy drink mixture, rather than what is touted as purely espresso and cream/flavoring. The flavor that I usually get is mocha, and the taste got some time to get used to -- I think because, in addition to the getting over the coffee in the mocha flavoring, there were the unexpected zings of an energy drink (other than these, I hadn't really partaken of energy drinks).

As for effectiveness, I had one in the morning and I'm jittery as anything. I take energy strangely, where I get foggy/sleepy before it kicks in, so during the hour or so I sipped this I felt a bit groggy. About half an hour later, though (this being about an hour and a half before typing this), I felt my mind start to race and my brain start to be on hyper mode. Typing this, I'm still jittery and hyper. I still feel my eyes wanting to sleep, my body's yawning, but it's not complete lethargy. It's like being tired but overly energetic at the same time. There may or may not be a crash in the near future, but as it is, I'm in a semi-productive state of mind -- that is, if I can get myself to concentrate.

Though, the effects I'm having are probably due to my body, personally. I'm guessing this affects different people differently. It can work as something of a boost for me, if I time drinking it right. If I'm already exhausted it'll keep me on a semi-awake plateau.

If you know what energy drinks do to you, it probably does something along that order. I can't really say much for sure.


Until recently, I'd only really had mocha whenever I had a doubleshot (which depending on my workload/schedule, varies from like once a month to once a week at least...it's been much towards the latter over the past two months). Maybe a month ago, I came across a non-coffee, non-vanilla, non-mocha variant of the drink that I'd not seen before: white chocolate. I was curious, so I tried it.

It could be that I'm used to mocha to the extent that the combination of coffee/energydrink and flavoring tastes odd with nythig else, but I have to say, I didn't really like it quite as much. There is a white chocolate flavor, but it's sort of tame, or light. I had to take a big sip to definitively taste it. The drink is definitely more 'mellow' feeling than the mocha. I don't know how to quite put it into words others will understand, but the adjectives "dark" and "deep" as compared to the mocha came to me. Kind of like it's more subdued, less sweet, less chocolatey. You get used to it as you drink, but at first I was a bit taken aback by the flavor, and not in a good way.

Chobani Yogurt

Being that I am, admittedly, prone to episodes of 'I should stop whining about what I don't like and do something,' I came across something somewhere that touted Greek yogurt as a good 'I need to get through this morning on something not ridiculously caloric' option. What the hell is Greek yogurt, I wondered. Not that didn't know of its existence; I'd seen it on the shelves, I just didn't know why the yogurt being Greek suddenly made it all that different. It had high protein, the article/yogurt cups said.

All they had to tell me was "it's twice as thick as normal yogurt. AND WE MEAN IT." The extra protein's a nice bonus for a carb-based lump like I am, but the real reason I fell for it was, when I finally went 'okay, I'll try it,' it was THICK.

(FYI: The only brand/type of Greek yogurt I can really go by is Chobani, so I'm going to use that as my example for now.)

It's actually to the point that the fruit-on-the-bottom types of the yogurt are thicker than plain, likely because they strain the yogurt just a little more to compensate for the liquid of the fruit that's...y'know...on the bottom. Chobani basically comes in Plain or fruit, with the Honey (and probably the Vanilla, too) being the exceptions. For its part, the Honey was a bit liquidy though -- like it was a fruit-on-the-bottom already mixed up for you, which I guess makes sense against dealing with honey-on-the-bottom.

For the fruit yogurts, I can't say I've tried all of them because (a) I haven't come across all of them and (b) some flavors, such as Lemon, I know on principle I probably will not enjoy, and I'm not paying for a three-dollar (where I get it) yogurt just to see if there's some manner of exception. As such, I can only go by the flavors I've had, which may only amount to three, actually.

Chobani has several  (about 20) flavors. Besides Plain and the aforementioned Vanilla and Honey flavors, they have a large assortment of fruit flavors that are either non-fat or low-fat (a distinction that I, personally, take little notice of, because 160 is only 10-20 calories more than the non-fat flavors, assuming we're not going for the 100 calorie plain. Also, this means MAX 160 calories, come on! For a pretty satisfying/healthyish breakfast, that sells the calorie counter in me.) The flavors range from Pineapple to Pomegranate, Raspberry to Apple Cinnamon (or so the website says, this one I have not seen). Black Cherry, Passionfruit, Pomegranate, Blood Orange, Peach...I just listed a large portion, but my point is, they have a LOT of different fruits.

There is also something listed on the website as Chobani Champions, a kids version of the yogurt. The four flavors are Orange-Vanilla (creamsicle, anyone?), VeryBerry, Vanilla Chocolate Chunk (fighting urge to underline CHOCOLATE) and Honey-Nana (honey + banana). These I've never seen, but the one with chocolate I definitely want to try. Do not joke with me about chocolate every meal of the day, I will take you up as serious.

I've spent long enough talking about the flavors -- if you're still on board, you're probably screaming okay, that's great, but HOW DOES IT TASTE?!

Like I said earlier, Greek yogurt is yogurt that's THICK. Granted, regular yogurt doesn't have to be uber-liquid (though it tends to be that way when heavily flavored, is what I'm guessing), but it usually has some manner of gloop to it - sort of like sour cream or mayonnaise, where it's not liquidy, per se, but it moves pretty easily. So far, besides the Plain yogurt I tried that had a reservoir of liquid on top of and inside the cracks of the yogurt, these have been pretty stable and thick. It's still soft and, well, yogurt, but it's got more resistance. I stress this so much because even the most delicious yogurts, after a while, become virtually inedible to me because I can't get over the liquidity.

Flavor-wise, the fruit on the bottom seems to be a puree of real fruit, almost like a little dollop of preserves was spread out on the bottom. If you mix the fruit, the viscosity goes down, of course (hence my aside about yogurts going uber-liquid), but even if you don't, you still get the fruit flavor. It seeps up from the fruit on the bottom, so it's lighter at the top, but even then if you're having, for instance, Strawberry, you'll get a nice light strawberry flavor that intensifies to the strawberries on the bottom. It's an effect I, personally, find quite nice.

Now, I would be doing a great injustice to this newfound breakfast love of mine if I didn't talk about the light-pink-colored cup. At first I thought it was Strawberry, yum. But then I saw the darker hue of the Strawberry packaging, so I looked closer, and saw this:

Strawberry. Banana. Greek. Yogurt.

Strawnana is hands-down one of my favorite flavors ever. Especially with fruit-flavored things (as opposed to eating actual fruits), seeing anything strawnana makes me really, really happy. This yogurt basically has the strawberry preserve-like-stuff on the bottom, only it's not clear, it's milkier-looking due to the pureed banana mixed in. Like the other fruit yogurts, this one has the gradient of strawberry-banana goodness if left unmixed. It gets a more level, intense flavor if you mix it, which probably also varies with how much yogurt you have left to mix, but the beauty of fruit on the bottom is you get to choose. (This is actually one thing I disliked a bit about the Honey flavor -- the honey was even throughout the yogurt so it overpowered the yogurt flavor in a strange way, or mixed with it in a ratio I wasn't quite sure I found enjoyable.)

I will be honest, one of my biggest motivations for writing this was to do a happy dance about the strawnana yogurt. Overall, though, I really like this stuff, even without that amazing icing to the yogurt cake! (...yogurt cake?)