Review: Balance Bar Almond Brownie Bar

As you can tell from the many reviews that I've done on this blog, Balance Bar has a lot of products and this plethora of products leads me to another review of a Balance Bar product, the Almond Brownie bar.  I picked this bar up at Meijer for $1.09 and it comes it at 1.76 ounces, 200 calories and fourteen grams of protein.  Based on the name of this one alone, I was highly anticipating trying it out because anytime you can take a brownie and try to make it "healthy", you've got me drawn in for a test by hook, line and sinker.

Unwrapping this one, I was taken aback by how much this did look like a brownie.  The outside was not smooth like a typical chocolate bar, but instead had the semi-coarse texture that you would find in your garden variety brownie.  Also, even before I broke this one in half for the photo, I was also very pleasantly surprised by the amount of almonds that were already visible on the exterior.  A lot of these bars hide the nuts on the interior, but this Balance Bar did no such thing.  As I broke this one open, the interior was just like the exterior in the fact that its texture very closely resembled that of a brownie and that is a great thing.  Just to continue the test to see how much like a brownie this actually is, I held it up to my nose to get a sniff and well, it smelled like a brownie.  So, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, well, let's see how it tasted...

Well, it tasted like a duck...I mean, brownie.  The chocolate was not sweet, but was instead hearty and thick like you'd get in your fresh brownie out of the oven.  While the bar was admittedly harder than your typical fresh brownie (think stale brownie hardness), I was expecting that since it's not exactly easy to mass produce a gooey brownie in bar form, so I'll cut them a little slack on that one.  The almonds added a nice crunch to the brownie flavoring and really, outside of the hardness of this bar, I could have shut my eyes and almost tricked myself into thinking I was eating a brownie.  It was that good of a representation.

Buy It or Fly By It?  Since this bar did an good job not only in taste, but also in its efforts to replicate an actual brownie, I definitely have to give this one a BUY IT rating.  In most of my Balance Bar reviews, I'm almost always pleased with the results, but my socks are never knocked off.  Most of their bars are above average in flavor and this is another one of those bars.  Is it the greatest bar ever?  No, it's not.  It is a good bar?  Yes, it is and that is the reason that you should give it a shot given the opportunity.

BUY IT!!