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| If you like the national brand, you'll like these. |
I’ve always liked the national brand
version of these, but curiously, my favorite flavor (banana nut)
doesn’t seem to ever be available at Aldi. (I’m thinking it's a
manufacturer thing: there are two major companies that make small
muffins and only one makes a banana nut variety, leading me to
believe it's the other company that makes Aldi's private label
brand.) However, I was in the mood for some small muffins, and also
figured our son might like them as something different, so I grabbed
me a box.
One thing that I've always hated about
these things, even as a kid, are the product counts: in each box, you
get twenty total muffins. Okay, that's a bigger deal when it's the
name brand and costs over $3, but not so bad at Aldi, where a box
retails for $1.99 (effectively making $.10 the cost-per-muffin).
However, it's the way they're broken down: five packs of four muffins
each. What the shit is that? That has always irked me for two
reasons: 1.) Four muffins is a ridiculously small amount; they're
gone by the time I even realize I'm eating them, and 2.) This leads
to an uneven number of packages. Sure, you could argue that five
packs cover a whole school or work week, for those packing them in
their lunches, but I've always thought it would make much more sense
to do four packs of five each. Maybe that's just me.
Anyway, once you crack a package open,
you pretty much know instantly what you're in for, with the candied
scent of artificial blueberry overwhelming the senses. This isn't
really a drawback for me; in fact, it's entirely what I was
expecting, since I ate them as a kid. The muffins themselves are
fairly moist, and as the smell would indicate, pack in quite a lot of
sweetness and fake fruit flavor. To heighten the illusion of reality,
there are also some actual blueberry pieces inside, although I can't
say for sure if they add much to the flavor—the muffin itself seems
to be saturated with a strong amount of the taste already, and the
blueberry I ate on its own didn't seem to have much substance. It's
fairly sweet, and will certainly be too much for some, but I think
it's a pretty good balance overall.
One thing that I will say—and maybe
it was just my mind playing tricks on me—but there were a couple
muffins in the box that kind of tasted different than the rest. They
weren't very sweet, and tasted almost salty, for lack of a better
term. Not overly so, but enough that I noticed it occasionally. Maybe
it was just a weird batch, or maybe it was just a glitch in my
tastebuds, but considering how sweet most of them are, it definitely
stood out to me. Thankfully, this only happened a couple of times
(and across a couple different packs), so I'll just chalk it up as an
anomaly, but it was still a rather bizarre occurrence worth noting.
Even dismissing the weird flavor
changes, these still aren't my favorite blueberry muffins in the
world, but they're a nice change of pace every once in a while when I
get sick of everything else in Aldi's breakfast aisle. And an item
that most people accustomed to the name brand will enjoy, especially
considering the lower price.
Overall: 6/10. These aren't the
greatest blueberry muffins in the world, but they're good enough to
satisfy those craving the artificial blueberry taste of mini muffins,
especially when the $1.99 price tag is taken into consideration. The
muffins are acceptably moist, and pack in a good amount of artificial
blueberry flavor without being too sweet or overly fakey. I did
notice a couple muffins tasted less sweet than other ones, which
might have merely been a weird batch flaw, or a random glitch in my
own tastebuds, but it was oddly noticeable the couple of times it
happened. Even dismissing the bizarre inconsistency of flavor, at the
end of the day, these are decent muffins that I would get again, but
not with any regularity or consistency.
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