Review: Haagen-Dazs Vanilla Milk Chocolate Almond Ice Cream Bars

After I just typed out the title of this review, I had this feeling that I might as well stop there because the name of this product pretty much described it all in terms of what I'd be getting.  Even with that, I paid the big $3.00 at Meijer for this box of three bars, so I figured I wouldn't let that money go to "waste" by not reviewing these Haagen-Dazs Vanilla Milk Chocolate Almond Ice Cream Bars to add to my rapidly expanding waistline, I mean review archive.  Each bar within the box comes in at 3.0 fluid ounces and has 300 calories, so as with all Haagen-Dazs products, it's not exactly a low calorie treat by any stretch of the imagination.

Just like my last Haagen-Dazs bar review, I never ceased to be amazed by how much of beasts these bars are in their largess.  Yes, they may have a lot of calories, but some of that is as a result of their size and not the super premium ingredients used in them.  Regardless of the size, the bar contained all the melted ingredients as the bar itself had an interior of creamy and smooth vanilla ice cream that was surrounded by a hard shell sweet and wonderfully smelling milk chocolate.  Melted into that milk chocolate shell was a more than ample helping of almond bits, so all the named ingredients in the bar were definitely well accounted for and that's a great start.

When I took my first healthy (I intentionally used that word because health and Haagen-Dazs have no relation to each other) bite of this bar and it delivered as I would have expected, with one key exception.  That exception was the fact that this packed a lot more almond flavor punch than I every would have expected and I found that both welcome and quite appetizing.  Naturally, those almond bits brought some additional chewing crunch on top of the snap crunch from the outer milk chocolate shell, which was both rich and sweet.  That richness and melting quality of the shell provided a wonderful contrast to the sweet and cooling vanilla ice cream, so along with the crunch of the nuts, the chocolate and vanilla brought a decadent quality to the bar.  If I could draw a VERY broad comparison, I would almost compare this (after the chocolate melted in my mouth) to a hot fudge sundae in that it had vanilla, chocolate and nuts all providing a similar type of feel in my mouth.

Buy It or Fly By It?  I expected a pretty basic product before I bit into this and what I got was a basic product with an added oomph provided by the almond flavor that made it into a very solid product that I thoroughly enjoyed, thereby giving it a BUY IT rating.  Granted, nothing about this was going to re-define my life in anyway, but it delivered what it promised so well that I can't help but thing this was nearly excellent.  If you want a standard flavor combination delivered in a very tasty way, this is definitely a route that I'd recommend pursuing.

BUY IT!!