Apple NO-tons (Apple Newton FAIL)
by Serendipitous | Published on August 9th, 2010, 6:22 pm | Food
The heat must have gotten to me. Or maybe the $1.00 risk seemed worth it. What was I thinking?Nabisco Apple Newtons were my favorite fruit cookie, and they've been unavailable for years now. So at the dollar store today, I thought I'd give Daddy Ray's Apple Bars a try. True - you'd think dollar-store noms was the first mistake, but I've actually found a few food items that weren't too bad.
Clearly marked on the package, they're made with real fruit and artificially flavored. Acceptable for $1.00. (Notice that the artificially flavored copy occurs twice!)
I opened the package and took out a couple of cookies. They smelled okay; they looked okay.
Mind you, I had already downgraded my expectation, knowing nothing could ever be the same as "real" newtons. That cookie "wrapped" around fruit filling, its perfect texture and flavor.
I took a bite. The cookie (let's call that the newton) was not too bad for a dollar store cookie. However, the filling -not very apple-y. I thought back to the Apple Newtons, likely made with dehydrated apples which had that texture of dried fruit chunks combined with squishy possibly mashed up apple "paste." These cookies had no chunks. I soon discovered they did have something else.
The next bite had a little crunch to it. Yeah, you know. The crunch of an itty bitty "pebble" just like Fig Newtons - the WHOLE reason I hate Fig Newtons. As a kid, I would eat the newton and leave the figs. To you, it's a previously-unknown 'Dippy talent!
(I hated anything with seeds and to this day, still don't like jelly/jam with seeds, though I can eat it without gagging. Blech!)And with the third bite, I was convinced it was a frakking fig bar in the wrong packaging.
And I wasn't entirely wrong.
The "real fruit" is figs and it's made with artificial apple flavoring.
(EDIT: It appears I overlooked the apples in the middle of the ingredients, which occurs AFTER figs in the list, indicating there are more figs than apples in the ingredients.) Yes, I could have read the ingredients before the purchase, but seriously, it was only $1.00 and a reminder that you get what you pay for. So basically I got 13 ounces of fig newtons for $0.15 more than what I would have spent to get a pair of actual Nabisco Fig Newtons in the vending machine at the office.
So there I was at my desk, with my post-lunch dessert that was more of a disappointment than I'd imagined. And as if that wasn't enough, one of those frakking fig seeds must have been caught between my teeth and dislodged a little bit ago, and it gave me a little crunch in a bite of banana as if to remind me of lunch and laugh at me, chuckling out, "Sucker!"
