All right, all you low-carbers/keto followers. Quest now has cookies. There are some other protein cookies on the market, but they aren't very low carb or low sugar. Quest has chocolate chip, double chocolate, peanut butter and oatmeal raisin.  I have tried all of them, but I prefer the good old chocolate chip. The peanut butter cookie isn't very peanut butter-y and the oatmeal raisin just has a strange aftertaste. 

250 calories, 10grams of saturated fat (which seems high to me) and a crapload of sodium at 220mg. 4grams of net carbs and 15grams of protein are very good for low carb diets if you follow the standard method of subtracting the sugar alcohols and fiber from the total carbs to get the net carbs. I know most low carbers/keto followers don't really count fat grams, but 10mg of saturated fat is high.  

Butter, palm oil and cocoa butter - that's why the saturated fat is so high. The other ingredients seem ok. Xanthan gum is a binder and is especially important when you're baking with ingredients other than wheat flour. I use it to help bind low carb treats that I make with almond flour. If you do a google search, you'll find all kinds of articles meant to scare  you away from it. In the scheme of food additives, it really isn't hazardous or unhealthy and there is such a tiny amount in a product like this that unless you know you are sensitive to it, it probably shouldn't cause any problems.  

Here is the cookie on a standard dinner napkin. It's about 3-4" around. For 250 calories, I might prefer something a little more substantial. It's not very filling, but it would make a pretty decent snack. It tastes very good, salty and sweet and chewy with lots of chocolate chips. It has a very satisfying texture. 
I got a box of 4 for $7.99 at Target, so about $2.00 per cookie. I recommend these if you can limit yourself or if you are on a low-carb or keto diet and want a treat that won't drive your daily carb numbers over the limit. 

I'm always on the hunt for decent tasting protein bars. I usually choose those with little to no sugar and mostly natural ingredients. Those are very hard to find! I saw this one in my local healthfood store and thought I would give it a go. 

This ingrdient list is very impressive. No added sugar, no frankenfoods. I didn't know what  hydrolyzed collagen was, so I had to do some research. www.thehealthyhomeeconomist.com/hydrolyzed-collagen-uses-and-benefits/- here is a very informative article on the subject.  There are a few popular protein bars that contain dates as either the first or one of the primary ingredients. I was anxious to see how they compared. 

290 calories is quite a bit and the 35 grams of carbs was pretty shocking. 25 grams of sugars mostly from the dates and raisins. I was hoping that for 290 calories, this would be quite filling and a satisfying meal replacement. 

It doesn't look too appetizing. 

Here's the inside. The texture was more cakey than some of the other date-heavy bars (Rx bar, I'm looking at you) and less sweet. The flavor was very cinnamon-y and very good. My taste tester liked it quite a bit. It was about $2.60 for one, which was comparable to other high quality protein bars. I want to note that Paleo Ranch also makes a "skinny" paleo bar which is quite lower in calories and carbohydrates. I'd buy this again. I just wish they had more flavors. 

The other day I was torturing myself (LOL) by checking out the cake mixes and frostings and noticed a new trend. There are tons of new products offering "mug cakes". 

There among the snack cakes was the FlapJacked Mighty Muffin. $2.48 for one. That sure did look like a healthier alternative. I also thought that since you prepare it in its own cup, it would be a handy snack for work. Just pour the water in, stir and pop it in the microwave. Boom! Cake! (or muffin) I chose the double chocolate flavor. 

Sorry about the blurry picture. 220 calories, 6 grams of fat (4.5 saturated), 21 grams of carbohydrates, 6 grams of fiber, 7 grams of sugar. Not bad. Check out the protein, calcium and iron.  Those are pretty good numbers. Of course, you know to subtract the fiber from the total carbohydrates to obtain the net carbohydrates, which would be 15 grams for this serving. The saturated fat is a little high, but compared to a store-baked muffin or snack cake, those numbers are not too bad.

Nothing crazy here. No artificial sweeteners, no artificial colors, no frankenfoods of any kind. 

I microwaved it for about 50 seconds in my little work microwave oven. It came out steamy and smelled really good and chocolately. Surprisingly, it was light and tender with a rich chocolate taste. The chocolate chips were a very nice extra chocolate flavor boost. I would definitely buy this again. Yes, it's a little pricey for such a small serving, but for a nutritious treat once in awhile, I'd say it's worth it. I plan to try the other flavors. 

I rarely venture down the snack cake aisle. Just too tempting!  I love Twinkies and Zingers especially, but they sure don't love me back. While perusing the healthy frozen entrees at my local Walmart Neighborhood store, I glanced at the snack cake aisle behind me and saw these. Made by Hostess, these are "decadent small batch treats." The products have no artificial colors or flavors and no high fructose corn syrup. That makes them healthy, right?  Don't answer that. I decided to get the Fudge Blondie Crispi Thins Cookie Thins and the White Fudge Vanilla Cake Delights. 

No artificial colors. Impressive. In case you didn't know what spirulina is, according to Wikipedia: Spirulina represents a biomass of cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) that can be consumed by humans and other animals. This has been approved for blue coloring. That ingredient list is pretty extensive. I also notice that the second ingredient is palm kernel oil, which is particularly unhealthy and bad for the environment. I will give Hostess credit for not using high fructose corn syrup, but that hardly matters when the first ingredients are sugar and palm oil. 

Nothing too surprising here. 210 for 3 little cakes, which are about the size of a ping pong ball. Lots of sugar, lots of carbs, lots of fat.

The ingredient list here seems pretty straightforward, but what in the heck is cerelose? "Cerelose A commercial preparation of glucose containing about 9% water."  I'm not sure why this is in here. Seems like a "frankenfood" that is completely unncessary, especially for a product that is trying to pass itself off as "natural." Real vanilla, no artificial flavors or colors and no high fructose corn syrup, yet they include cerelose. 

The worst part of this nutrition label, in my opinion, is that you somehow have to judge what 1 ounce really means. Is it 5 pieces? 10 pieces?  It is very hard to determine since the cookie pieces are not all the same size. Some of them are broken pieces. You would have to own a food scale to really figure out how much you're eating. 

As you can see, the image on the package is not very representative of the actual product. What I have shown is just a random sample I took from the bag. Some had chips and some didn't. Interestingly; however, none of the pieces had more than two chips. The color is darker and the cookie itself is more crumbly than those pictured on the package. What did they taste like? Glad you asked. These are very good. The texture is thin, but not easily breakable and they almost melt in your mouth. The chip to cookie ratio was overall very good and even the pieces without chips are yummy. Strong but not overpowering vanilla flavor, which is typical for a "blondie." There is almost no way a person could present them on a platter as nicely as shown on the package. I'm not sure why a consumer would choose these over buying a traditional cookie unless you wanted a bag of broken chocolate chip cookies. Again, as with the cake delights, the packaging is dangerous for a person who had little self-control. These were $3.00 a bag for 6 ounces.  Good, but nothing spectacular or very new as far as taste.