Duncan Hines Oven Ready Chocolate Chip Brownies

Price: $3.49
Serving: 1/12 of the pan, 1.4oz
Calories: 170 per serving
Calories from Fat: 70
Fat: 12%, 8g
Saturated Fat: 13%, 2.5g
Trans Fat: 1g
Cholesterol: 5%, 15mg
Sodium: 4%, 85mg
Protein: 2g
Carbohydrates: 8%, 24g
Fiber: 0%, <1g
Sugar: 14g
Weight Watchers Points: 4 Points

Duncan Hines says: First brownie that comes frozen and ready to bake. Packaged in convenient, oven-ready trays - no prep and no clean-up necessary. Ready to serve in just 30 minutes from freezer to oven.

Abi says: Sometimes when I’m at a conference or a non-food professional event someone will introduce me as a person who knows a lot about frozen food. This leads to the inevitable ‘So what is your favorite frozen food?’ question, to which I want to reply ‘I have a whole blog section about that.’

But last week, instead of telling someone about my favorite frozen food, I said flat out that there is not one acceptable frozen brownie on the market. And then I got looks that basically said “How many frozen brownies does someone have to eat to know that?”

I’ve thought a lot about this frozen brownie problem. Sure, it is dessert. And dessert in almost any form is going to be good. But judged against the vast pantheon of desserts on Heat Eat Review (yes, there’s a these oven ready items are a castrated version of real dessert. And it isn’t just the preservative-laden ones that you get from Wal-Mart. Even the Trader Joe’s ready-to-bake brownies leave a lot to be desired.

And these ones aren’t even brownies. These are blondies. They bake up golden brown into an enormous lazy-man’s cookie. Mmmmmm, lazy-man’s cookie. But looks aren’t everything: the dough in these falls flat, tasting barely decent fresh out of the oven and turning into something less than utterly delicious upon cooling. Weirdly, the most succinct review of this is on Wal-Mart’s website:

This product does not at all taste like brownies,it tastes more like a cheap cake that has been sitting around for weeks and has became [sic] stale.

Furthermore, the chocolate chips included are miserly smidgens of chocolate, each just big enough to remind you that there’s better chocolate in the world and right now you are not eating it.

Combining stale cake and lame chocolate into one medium-sized tray made a dessert that managed to stick around my house for days before being totally consumed. It was as though we all knew these brownies were spiked with something and thus avoided them at all costs.

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