NEWS: Mountain Dew To Bring Back Original Game Fuel Flavor, But Not For The Video Game Barbie: Jet, Set & Style*

(*Barbie: Jet, Set & Style is a real video game that will be released next month.)

The Dew is dewing it again.

In 2007, Mountain Dew released their first soda under the Game Fuel label. It had a citrus cherry flavor and coincided with the release of the Xbox 360 game Halo 3. In 2009, they teamed up with Blizzard Entertainment, makers of the popular MMORPG World of Warcraft, to create Mountain Dew Horde Red Game Fuel and Mountain Dew Alliance Blue Game Fuel.

This year, Mountain Dew is joining forces with Activision to bring back Mountain Dew Game Fuel and promote the upcoming game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, which is scheduled to be released in November. The limited edition Game Fuel will come in two flavors: the original citrus cherry flavor and a brand new tropical flavor.

Specially marked bottles will feature codes that will deliver Double XP time to players in the multi-player mode of Modern Warfare 3. The Double XP time offer will also be available on specially marked packages of Doritos.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Mountain Dew Game Fuel will be available in October.

REVIEW: Land O’Lakes Cinnamon Sugar Butter Spread

Land O'Lakes Cinnamon Sugar Butter Spread

During college, one of my best friends developed a loaf-a-week cinnamon toast habit. It got to the point where she’d leave a softened stick of butter at the ready in the cabinet with the cups and bowls, and a dish of pre-mixed cinnamon sugar out on the kitchen counter the way some people seem to leave out plates of cocaine. When I first got wind of Land O’Lakes’ new Cinnamon Sugar Butter Spread, I immediately thought of her, and wondered if the current residents of our old apartment ever question the inexplicable gritty texture of every surface in their kitchen.

I then also wondered if that poor kitchen still reeks of rotting potato, but that’s a whole other story which I’d rather not relive except to say: Always know the age and quantity of your stockpile of spuds, kids. The consequences of careless potato storage are dire and long lasting. Your friends may never visit again.

But enough with that PSA. Cue the little shooting star icon. Back to the sweet, sweet wonders of butter with bonus goodies.

My first experience with the concept came with homemade honey butter. I loved that shit as a kid. One day, in one of those bowls o’ condiments provided with the complimentary bread at some restaurant, I found a pre-combined version. Gleefully tearing into the little packet I discovered it to be full of disappointment. Bland, overly blended, and too heavy on the butter, it just wasn’t the melty sweet punch I’d fallen in love with. When the same kid, who tried to eat the fake toast in her Fisher Price kitchen years after it could be written off as an age-appropriate mistake, denounces your attempt at something as simple as honey butter, you know you have failed.

I like to envision foods like honey and butter existing perpetually as couples in hopelessly failing culinary marriages. They’d really like to stay together for their consumers, but to do that they need the help of a marriage counselor of sorts in form of some type of weird additive. Unfortunately, more often than not, either that additive is an awful counselor or they find they hate each other so much it ceases to matter, resulting in an inferior product. You can almost taste the contempt.

However, when you, the consumer, bring those same items together for just the brief time it takes to devour them, they sometimes magically rediscover what brought them together in the first place. It’s a child’s depressing little dream come true. For one brief moment they’re happy, nostalgic, and delicious. Everyone is laughing. If we were to give it five more minutes, maybe tack a prologue onto those credits, however, honey would inevitably bring up butter’s affair with apples, sending them back to square one. I worried that would be the case with the Cinnamon Sugar Butter Spread – more fit for Lifetime than for the Disney Channel.

Luckily, as you probably noticed in the initial news blurb on this site, Land O’Lakes managed to keep the ingredient list short (and sweet), offering us a relatively simple amalgam of cream, sugar, canola oil, water, cinnamon, salt, and citric acid. What the tiny print on the back of the package reveals, however, is that this stuff is 19% canola oil – enough to cancel out any of the meager calcium benefits of regular butter consumption while creating a product that melts more smoothly and easily than the most genetically modified margarine commercially available today. It would seem that Land O’Lakes has attempted to achieve ingredient harmony by giving up completely and suspending everything in oil.

Land O'Lakes Cinnamon Sugar Butter Spread Stuff Spreaded On

The spread itself has a color that’s almost similar to peanut butter. It also has a comparable texture when pulled right out of the refrigerator. Apply it to a room temperature item, though, and the canola oil kicks in. The butter instantly melts down to a spreadable level without being absorbed into the bread (or blueberry bagel or oatmeal cookie if you’re me and trying to be thorough with your sampling). Seriously, it’s like grabbing mercury. I hadn’t had butter that wasn’t in stick form in probably three or four years, so this completely astounded me. What wonders will they think of next? Wireless internet? Pre-sliced frozen pizza?? Individual Kool-Aid packets??? Baffling technology, the lot of it.

If you just eat a dab of the stuff, it’s almost like consuming pure cinnamon bark which has inexplicably melted. It wasn’t nearly as sweet as I expected. In fact, pretty much everything else plays second fiddle. The forgotten background butter flavor only really came through on the bagel. On the toast? So much non-stop cinnamon action! So little anything else. And the oatmeal raisin cookie? In hindsight, I should’ve cinna-buttered a snickerdoodle instead, for maximum redundancy. I will say this for the cookie, though: it was only the contender to tone down the borderline overwhelming cinnamon assault, and it did so with dazzling oatmeally bravado.

Luckily, I’m a cinnamon fan. Hell, I’m drinking Cinnabon coffee creamer right now. In my coffee. I haven’t broken down and started downing the stuff on its own. Yet. If you’re not a cinnamon fan, well, honestly, why would you buy this in the first place? Just know this stuff is for the hardcore cinnaficionados. You want cinnamon sugar butter spread? You can’t handle this spread!

Taken for what it is, the Land O’Lakes Cinnamon Sugar Butter Spread is quite tasty, but it’s understandably a bit removed from the homemade version. I guess it all comes down to this: do you prefer your kitchen counters oily or gritty?

(Nutrition Facts – 1 Tbsp – 70 calories, 60 calories from fat, 6 grams of fat, 2.5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 10 milligrams of cholesterol, 30 milligrams of sodium, 4 grams of carbohydrates, 0 gram of fiber, 4 grams of sugar, 0 grams of protein, and 2% Vitamin A.)

Item: Land O’Lakes Cinnamon Sugar Butter Spread
Price: $2.79
Size: 6.5 oz
Purchased at: Albertson’s
Rating: 5 out of 10
Pros: Bursting with cinnamon. “The more you know” PSAs. Not held together by additive whack jobs. Wireless internet. Pre-sliced frozen pizza. Honey on butter. Gave me an excuse to butter a cookie. Oatmeally bravado. Great on bagels.
Cons: Easy to forget it’s technically a butter product. Honey butter packets of indeterminate age. Rotting potatoes. It’s mostly just canola oil. Might be too extreme for medium-core cinnamon enthusiasts. Reaching for a glass in the cabinet and grabbing butter. Sugar has almost completely bowed out of this marriage of convenience.

REVIEW: Pillsbury Sausage & Cheese Grands! Biscuit Sandwiches

Pillsbury Sausage & Cheese Grands! Biscuit Sandwiches

I hate the Albino 3D Gingerbreadbaker, or as he’s more commonly known as, the Pillsbury Doughboy. Look at him smiling and being shielded by the Pillsbury logo on the box of his new Pillsbury Sausage & Cheese Grands! Biscuit Sandwiches.

He better hide behind that logo because I want to throw one of his new breakfast biscuits at him…frozen. Why frozen? Because I’m pretty sure throwing a heated one at the Doughboy as a projectile is as unsatisfying as eating one.

Each box comes with two sandwiches, which are individually wrapped and split into two halves. Depending on how powerful your microwave oven is, preparing a biscuit sandwich takes anywhere from one minute and 15 seconds to two minutes and 15 seconds. Sadly, for those of you who don’t like the convenience of a microwave oven, there are no conventional or toaster oven instructions.

Pillsbury Sausage & Cheese Grands! Biscuit Sandwiches Closeup 2

Look, Pillsbury knows how to make dough and produce commercials that make you want to poke other peoples’ bellies to see if they giggle, but the eggs, cheese sauce, and sausage in the Pillsbury Sausage & Cheese Grands! Biscuit Sandwiches are things they don’t know how to do well. All of the ingredients in the middle of the sandwich get lost in the flavor of the somewhat tasty buttermilk biscuit, which was a little chewy in places and slightly fragile.

I can understand the eggs not providing much flavor, because with a lot of frozen breakfast items, the eggs usually just give everything a little color, some protein, and jack up the amount of cholesterol the product has. However, it’s disappointing the sausage and cheese sauce didn’t have strong flavors because look at the photo above. It looks like the buttermilk biscuit was caught in the middle of a pork hail and cheese rain storm. It’s covered in both, but it doesn’t make a difference in terms of flavor.

Pillsbury Sausage & Cheese Grands! Biscuit Sandwiches Closeup 1

The only way a three inch wide and 1.5 inch tall Pillsbury Sausage & Cheese Grands! Biscuit Sandwich could be satisfying is if I could strap the Pillsbury Doughboy to one as I microwave it and listen to him plead for forgiveness as he’s pounded by microwave radiation.

Of course, it would only be satisfying for me.

For the Pillsbury Doughboy, not so much.

(Nutrition Facts – 1 sandwich – 280 calories, 140 calories from fat, 16 grams of fat, 9 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams trans fat*, 95 milligrams of cholesterol, 730 milligrams of sodium, 26 grams of carbohydrates, less than 1 gram of fiber, 2 grams of sugar, 9 grams of protein, 2% vitamin A, 6% calcium, and 8% iron.)

*Uses partially hydrogenated oil

Item: Pillsbury Sausage & Cheese Grands! Biscuit Sandwiches
Price: $3.00 (on sale)
Size: 2 sandwiches
Purchased at: Safeway
Rating: 4 out of 10
Pros: Decent tasting buttermilk biscuit. Getting to bake the Pillsbury Doughboy. Lots of sausage and cheese sauce.
Cons: Hard to detect the cheese sauce and sausage. Eggs don’t provide any flavor. Kind of small. Pricey for two sandwiches. Biscuit was chewy in some places. Uses partially hydrogenated oil. No conventional or toaster oven instructions.

REVIEW: Dunkin’ Donuts Chicken Salad Sandwich

Dunkin' Donuts Chicken Salad Sandwich

Since starting at The Impulsive Buy, I’ve reviewed three new Dunkin’ Donuts products, none of which I was, um, all that crazy about. I fully intend, however, to continue reviewing their products because DD keeps introducing distinctive new items that pique my interest. (I suppose it also doesn’t hurt that there’s a Dunkin’ Donuts right across the street from my apartment and I’m too lazy to walk any farther to pick up other review items.) Their latest offering is the new Chicken Salad Sandwich.

After doing a limited rollout in the greater New York area a few months back, Dunkin’ Donuts has recently undertaken a broader release of the Chicken Salad Sandwich. I’m guessing the chicken salad is being marketed alongside the tuna salad to re-confuse Jessica Simpson about what exactly Chicken of the Sea is; similarly, I am making a Jessica Simpson joke to confuse any people who don’t remember their reality TV news from 2003.

I ordered my Chicken Salad Sandwich on a croissant and without cheese, just as it’s depicted in all the ads. At first glance, it looked like I probably could’ve asked for a Mayonnaise Sandwich with Some Chicken or Whatever Miscellaneous Meat You Have Back There, and I would’ve gotten more or less the same thing. Even good chicken salads aren’t particularly pleasing aesthetically, so I couldn’t judge the sandwich strictly on appearance.

Dunkin' Donuts Chicken Salad Sandwich Split

Unfortunately, the experience of actually eating the chicken salad wasn’t any better. The chunks of chicken were relatively sizable and plentiful, but they tasted very bland and were completely overpowered by the presence of the mayonnaise. The celery pieces added some much needed crunch to the texture of the chicken salad, yet there weren’t enough pieces to prevent the overall sandwich from being too mushy. The croissant was the same type Dunkin’ Donuts uses for their regular breakfast sandwiches, but this sandwich is served cold so my croissant was un-toasted and lacking in its customary flakiness.

As for the mayonnaise… well, the nicest thing I can say is that at least the mayo doesn’t suffer from both conditions of the famous Woody Allen quote “Boy the food at this place is really terrible.” “Yeah, I know, and such small portions!”  The mayo is definitely odd-tasting, and there’s plenty of it. At first it tasted jarringly sweet, and although each bite got me a bit more acclimated to the mayo’s sweetness, the blandness of the chicken and celery and the absence of any more ingredients meant the chicken salad just didn’t have any other flavors worth detecting. Additionally, more of the excess mayonnaise got squeezed out the sides of the sandwich with each bite, so the whole eating process was much messier than it really had to be.

The Chicken Salad Sandwich was altogether pretty bad. Once again, I would recommend you skip Dunkin’ Donuts’ latest offering. That being said, I appreciate their efforts in steadily introducing new products that are true departures from their regular menu and not just a re-packaging and re-naming of existing ingredients and items. (I’m looking at you, Taco Bell. I hope you know I ate that Beefy Melt Burrito because I was drunk and it was 99 cents, not because I thought you had something new and worth trying.) So Dunkin’ Donuts, stay the course and just keep coming out with different products, and I will keep trying them until that day comes when I can write a positive review on a new item I actually enjoy. (Or until I move into a new apartment, whichever comes first.)

(Nutrition Facts – 1 sandwich on croissant – 560 calories, 340 calories from fat, 37 grams of fat, 10 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 45 milligrams of cholesterol, 890 milligrams of cholesterol, 38 grams of carbohydrates, 2 grams of fiber, 6 grams of sugar, 17 grams of protein, 2% vitamin A, 2% vitamin C, 4% calcium, and 15% iron.)

Other Dunkin’ Donuts Chicken Salad Sandwich reviews:
Foodette Reviews

Item: Dunkin’ Donuts Chicken Salad Sandwich
Price: $2.99
Size: 1 sandwich
Purchased at: Dunkin’ Donuts
Rating: 3 out of 10
Pros: Chicken was sizable and plentiful. Celery added good crunch. Dunkin’ Donuts’ willingness to introduce actual new products. Having a Dunkin’ Donuts right across the street from my apartment. Annie Hall. Drunk-eating Taco Bell.
Cons: Chicken was bland. Not enough celery. Too much mayonnaise. Jarringly sweet mayonnaise. Croissant wasn’t toasted. Sandwich got messy. Drunk-eating Taco Bell.

NEWS: Snapple’s ‘Tea Will Be Loved’ Is Made From The Best Stuff Maroon 5 Picked

Next month, Snapple will be releasing a limited edition flavored tea called, Tea Will Be Loved, which was created with Grammy award-winning band Maroon 5. The beverage will benefit the hunger relief organization Feeding America, which helps to provide 1,750,000 meals to those in need.

The limited edition flavor is a blend of green and black teas with, according to its bottle, a “Maroon 5 Fruit Mash-Up.” What that means is each band member chose their own flavor to add to the tea. The five flavors are pomegranate, orange, blackberry, raspberry, and hibiscus. I’m guessing Adam Levine chose hibiscus. I’d guess what the other band members chose, but, to be honest, without looking at Wikipedia, I can’t name the other members of Maroon 5.

Tea Will Be Loved will also feature specially marked gold Snapple caps with Real Facts about the band and Feeding America. Although, I’m pretty sure if you read Maroon 5’s Wikipedia page, you’ll know more Real Facts than those bottle caps.

Snapple’s Tea Will Be Loved will be available for a limited time at participating retailers nationwide starting on September 1, 2011.