Trader Joe's Celebration Cake Gelato

Sonia and I are celebrating our 14th anniversary this week, so among other things, we decided to break open this Celebration Cake Gelato since neither of us got to try it around our birthdays.

It's pretty obviously just a birthday cake style frozen dessert: vanilla with colorful sprinkles. It has the dense creaminess of gelato, the indulgent sweetness of cake and icing, and the fun, festive colors you'd associate with any type of celebration.

But here's the best part and the worst part: there are real cake pieces throughout the mix, and the bites that contain some are superb and scrumptious, but they are way too small and far and few between—so most bites, unfortunately, do not contain any luscious birthday cake.

Eating straight from the pint container becomes a mining errand, with each cakeless bite causing more and more frustration and each cakeful one propelling the consumer to dig with renewed fervor in search of that motherlode of legendary cakey goodness.

Alas, there was no giant cache of cake at the bottom of the carton. There were maybe a dozen paltry whispers of baked confection in the entire product. It almost would have been better to include none so we'd have been ignorant of what we were missing.

Our final score would have been at least one and a half stars higher had there been adequate quantities of cake in this product. As is, Sonia will still throw out a generous four out of five. I'll go with three and a half. Trader Joe's Celebration Cake Gelato with Cake Pieces & Rainbow Sprinkles is good, but it needs more mix-ins to be considered great. $3.79 for the pint.

Bottom line: 7.5 out of 10.

Trader Joe's Honeycrisp Apple Granola

You know what makes apple flavored stuff taste better? Apple, apple, and more apple. The greater the quantity of real apple, the better. I guess the folks at Trader Joe's know that, and that's why they put a bunch of dried apple pieces all throughout this cereal. The pieces are surprisingly large, they're very sweet, and they aren't particularly leathery like dried apple can be sometimes.

The granola is pretty standard. It's just clusters of rolled oats, rice flour, and sweeteners like brown rice syrup and cane sugar. We recently looked at another brand's apple granola and really liked it as well.

That product had little corn flake type pieces in it which I enjoyed quite a bit, however, the dried apple pieces were much smaller than Trader Joe's offering. Sonia didn't care for the flake pieces, so she's much more fond of this Trader Joe's Honeycrisp Apple Granola.

It would make a great yogurt topper or trail mix ingredient. In addition to having it with milk, we both snack on it plain every once in a while, too. It's sweet and hearty enough it makes a great mid-day snack or breakfast. It looks like this one might already be done for the season. Curse you, Trader Joe. Oh well. We'd buy it again next year.

$3.99 for the 12 oz resealable bag, which we went through pretty quickly. 

Four and a half stars from Sonia. Four stars from me for Trader Joe's Honeycrisp Apple Granola.

Bottom line: 8.5 out of 10.

Trader Joe's Petite Pumpkin Spice Cookies

I know, I know. Pumpkin triggers some of you. It seems to be especially bad when it's "pumpkin spice." I think "pumpkin spice latte" is the epitome of fall fare trigger phrases. With that in mind, "petite pumpkin spice cookies" probably isn't exactly music to some of your ears, but hey, I know you're not going to want to hear this: you pumpkin-haters are a distinct minority.

Repeatedly, routinely, across all social media, people taking polls about pumpkin spice respond positively to PS products and say they do want pumpkin and pumpkin spice reviews. It's just under 25% that seem to despise the stuff. So until those polls hit 51% anti-pumpkin sentiment or higher, I'm gonna keep buying and reviewing these products.

Now I certainly don't love every pumpkin spice product I try—not by a long shot. Nor do I hate every pumpkin product I try. I do get tired of it each and every year by the end of the autumn season, but then I'm always ready for some more 9 or 10 months later. This is only our third new pumpkin item of the season from Trader Joe's, so I'm still more or less in pumpkin spice mode and Sonia most definitely is, too.

That said, these cookies are pretty much what I expected them to be. The only thing on the packaging that threw me off a little was where they describe these cookies as "shortbread." I'm not saying they're not shortbread, but I think "gingerbread" would have been more accurate in terms of flavor.

Sonia likes them a good bit more than I do. They remind her of Mother's Circus Animals, but with cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and ginger. She likes them a lot with coffee, and she thinks they'd be fun for kids or office parties.

There are white pumpkins with orange nonpareils and orange pumpkins with white nonpareils. They're yogurty on the outside and crunchy and bready on the inside. Like I said: no surprises here. The pumpkin spice level is fairly well balanced with the sweet coating and the wheat cookie flavors, but these little treats are still just garden-variety autumnal snackage by my estimation.

$3.99 for the 10 oz box. Sonia would buy again next year. Four stars from her. I'd eat a couple out of Sonia's box, but I would not feel the need to purchase my own. Three out of five stars from me for Trader Joe's Petite Pumpkin Spice Cookies.

Bottom line: 7 out of 10.