Apple Crumble Sundae at McDonald’s

McDonald's Apple Crumble SundaeLocation: 165 North Queen Street, Etobicoke
Websitehttps://www.mcdonalds.com/ca/en-ca.html

I’ll admit it: I was quite impressed by the Apple Crumble Sundae from McDonald’s.  I really enjoyed it.

It’s quite simple: vanilla soft serve layered with spiced apple topping, and sprinkled with with cinnamon oat crumble.

The spiced apple topping is essentially apple pie filling, with a decent amount of small apple chunks.  It’s a little bit tart, which works well with the very sweet crumble and ice cream.

The crumble is a little bit too hard and crunchy, but it has a satisfying brown sugar flavour that compliments the apple topping and the ice cream nicely.

The ice cream is the ice cream.  If you need me to describe McDonald’s soft serve for you, I really don’t know what you’re doing here.

There’s not much more to say about it than that.  It tastes like an apple crumble in sundae form.  It’s exactly what you want it to be.

Bacon Maple Chicken Sandwich at Wendy’s

Bacon Maple Chicken Sandwich from Wendy'sLocation: 1569 The Queensway, Etobicoke
Websitehttps://www.wendys.com/en-ca/home

I actually quite like Wendy’s.  I mean, it’s still a fast food chain, so it’s not great — but it’s one of the better ones.

Well, usually, at least.

The Bacon Maple Chicken Sandwich definitely isn’t their finest hour.  It’s a fried chicken sandwich served on a croissant bun and topped with Swiss cheese, maple glaze, and bacon.

It’s super sweet and super dry, and I just did not enjoy eating it at all.

Bacon Maple Chicken Sandwich from Wendy's

The “maple glaze” is basically just thick, sludgy maple syrup.  It’s intensely sweet and far too overwhelming for a sandwich like this.  The mildly spicy chicken patty (you can get spicy or original) helps to balance out the sweetness a little bit, but it’s not nearly enough to overcome the sugar overload.

Everything else is dry.  The fried chicken patty is dry, the “croissant” bun is dry (and aside from the cosmetic, it has zero croissant-like properties), the completely unmelted cheese is dry — even the bacon is dry.  I like crispy bacon as much as the next guy, but the glass-like strips in this sandwich were taking it a bit too far.

It really needed additional sauce to give it moisture, but adding more of the maple glaze would pretty much be instant diabetes.  The whole thing is head-scratchingly misguided.

FYI: Tom’s Dairy Freeze is Closing for the Season Soon

Tom's Dairy FreezeLocation630 The Queensway, Etobicoke
Websitehttp://www.tomsdairyfreeze.ca/

…Specifically, it’s closing in just over a couple of weeks, on the 25th of November.  So you should probably head over there while you still can.

Yes, it’s starting to get a bit chilly outside, so an ice cream joint with no indoor seating probably isn’t too high on your list of priorities.  But delicious is delicious — cold schmold.

I just tried the Jack and Jill sundae, which features vanilla soft serve topped with chocolate and marshmallow sauces.  The soft serve was as creamy and tasty as ever, and the chocolate/marshmallow combination is a clear winner.

Fluffernutter Goodness at Lola’s Gelato

Lola's GelatoLocation: 16 Brookers Lane, Etobicoke
Websitehttps://www.lolasgelato.com/

Fluffernutters are delicious.  That’s a fact.

In case you’ve been living an empty sham of a life and are unaware of the magic of the fluffernutter, it’s basically like a PB and J, but with gooey marshmallow sauce subbed in for the jam.  It’s the best.

Lola's Gelato

They have a fluffernutter-inspired flavour of gelato at Lola’s.  Obviously I had to try it.

This was my first time having the gelato Lola’s.  The quality is quite good — it’s not the richest or the creamiest gelato I’ve ever had, but it’s solid.  It’s above average.

Lola's Gelato

The flavour (called WTF – What the Fluffernutter) consists of peanut butter gelato swirled with marshmallow sauce, with Oreo bits interspersed throughout.  It was really tasty.  I wish the peanut butter flavour were a bit more pronounced — it doesn’t quite recapture the gooey, peanut-buttery joys of a fluffernutter sandwich — but it’s quite good regardless.

Terrible Ice Cream at Baskin Robbins

Baskin RobbinsLocation: 855 The Queensway, Etobicoke
Websitehttp://www.baskinrobbins.ca/

This probably won’t come as much of a surprise: it turns out that the ice cream at Baskin Robbins isn’t very good.  I haven’t been there in several years, but I remember it being decent enough.

Either I’ve become pickier in the meantime, or it’s become worse.  Probably a bit of both.

I tried the current flavour of the month, Cookies ‘n Cake: “Cake flavored ice cream, cookie pieces, and a chocolate cake batter flavored ribbon.”

Baskin Robbins

The quality of the ice cream itself was pretty bad; it was slightly better than really bottom-of-the-barrel stuff like Chapman’s, but that’s really not saying much.  The texture was thin and unsatisfying.

The flavour was even worse.  I’ve eaten a lot of cake in my lifetime, and none of it even remotely tasted like the ice cream here.  I’m normally fine with artificial, cake-flavoured junk food, but this stuff was just vile.  I’m having a hard time even figuring out how to describe the flavour — it was acrid and unpleasant and weird.

The cookie chunks were good, at least — they were Oreo pieces, so no surprise there.  But the “chocolate cake batter flavored ribbon” basically just tasted like a sweeter, less chocolatey version of Nesquik chocoalte syrup.  It wasn’t offensive like the ice cream, but it wasn’t particularly good, either.