Review: Skinny Cow Cookies 'n Dough Ice Cream Candy Bars

I would describe my relationship with Skinny Cow products as tortured.  Ordinarily, I find their treats to be tasty, but a lot of the times, I can't quite reconcile the price I'm paying for what I'm getting.  That said, I was recently at my local Marsh Supermarket and saw the perfect time to pick up Skinny Cow products...they were on sale (along with an additional coupon)!  With that sale and coupon, I picked up this box of their new  Skinny Cow Cookies 'n Dough Ice Cream Candy Bars at the sale price of $3.99 for a box of five.  Each bar is 2.1 fluid ounces and has 160 calories with a four point rating on the Weight Watchers PointsPlus scale, so it's not a belly buster and that's obviously what you'd expect from a "skinny" product.

The outside of the box does all the heavy lifting for me on the description of this one, but I'll dive into it anyway.  This frozen candy bar is low fat ice cream topped with a cookie dough mix of soft and hard cookie dough that is completely encased in a hard chocolate outer layer.  Or, as the Skinny Cow website describes it, "Low fat vanilla ice cream layered with ooey-gooey cookie dough, topped with baked cookie dough pieces, all enrobed in rich chocolatey coating."  Outside of that line, I'm not sure that I can add much.  The chocolate is hard and smells somewhat like chocolate and the ice cream smells like nothing.  I was surprised at the hardness and flakiness of the baked cookie dough pieces, so that at least made me believe there was going to be some crunch here (outside of the chocolate).

Well, the chocolate only provided an initial crunch before it melted in my mouth.  As for its flavor, it was neither rich, nor sweet.  It was just blandish chocolate.  Speaking of bland, the ice cream was definitely that. It was cold (obviously), but that's about all I can remember about it.  The primary focus of this review and this bar, as it should be since it is the name, is the cookie dough pieces and those were kind of a hit and a miss.  They were a hit because they baked cookie dough pieces did provide some sort of crunch to the bar and any time crunch is adding to something, I certainly appreciate it.  The miss was that the "ooey-gooey" cookie dough didn't really have a lot of flavor and neither did the cookie dough pieces.  They were obviously cookie dough and had that faint recognition of flavor, but nothing about them contained that vanilla or brown sugar flavor that delicious cookies have.  It was just blah and that's really all I can say about that.

Buy It or Fly By It?  This was a fun idea that just turned into a bore.  It wasn't a bad flavor and I guess it was sort of like a frozen cookie dough ice cream bar, but at the Skinny Cow prices (let's ignore that I bought these on sale), I can't reconcile paying that much money for only five bars with mediocre flavor.  It's because of that that I give these a FLY BY IT rating and once again, my tortured history with the Skinny Cow continues.

FLY BY IT!!