Review: PowerBar Recovery Cookies & Cream Caramel Crisp with Chocolatey Coating Bar

For better or worse, I work out a lot.  I spend over two hours a day doing cardio and while that may seem cool, it really drains me sometimes and others consider me borderline insane for doing it.  For all I know, they may be right.  Anyway, since that does drain me, I'm always looking for ways to help get my bearings back and seeing that PowerBar has these Recovery bars available (this one is part of the post-workout "Rebuild" stage), I'm always willing to try one out to see how they taste because whether they actually work is debatable.  I've reviewed some of these bars, along with other PowerBars on this blog before, so this is not my first rodeo.  This PowerBar Recovery Cookies & Cream Caramel Crisp with Chocolatey Coating Bar (say that five times fast!) was picked up at Meijer for $1.03 and is 1.97 ounces, 250 calories and has twelve grams of protein.

When I tore the wrapper off of this, my first observation that the caramel interior was oozing everywhere.  I guess I did a bad job of transporting this one back to my house, but seeing that much caramel as a first impression was a nice thing since I really do love caramel.  After seeing that, I broke the bar in half and observed it was constructed with a thick caramel base layer that had fairly large chocolate cookie bits (cookies & cream part) that was topped with a rice crisp layer that had a cracker-like texture.  The entire bar was then encased by a thick chocolate layer.

Biting into this, I nearly broke my teeth (again).  This bar was quite hard and quite difficult to chew and that did not make me a happy man.  Once I got my jaw loosened up, I started looking for flavors and sadly, I couldn't find many.  The caramel was flat and almost bitter and had not sweetness at all.  The chocolate was even flatter and had even less sweetness than the caramel and when you were expecting some sweetness from one or both of those things, the absence of any was quite disappointing.  The positives were that the rice crisp and cookie bits did add a nice crunch to the bar.  The rice crisp crunch was almost cracker-like in its airiness.  The cookie bits add a more solid crunch to the bar, so those two positives saved this bar from being an utter failure.  Still, that's not saying much.

Buy It or Fly By It?  When the only positives I can find in a bar revolve around two minimal pieces of its texture and not its flavor, that is obviously not a good thing and it results in a FLY BY IT rating.  I would not recommend this bar to anyone and that is too bad, because when you look at the product description and visual appearance of this bar, it really does seem like it would be a winner.  Looks are only skin deep though and the looks did not translate to taste here.

FLY BY IT!!