July 26th: Lenny & Larry's Muscle Brownies

We have no qualms spreading our wings and embracing the wider choco-sphere when it comes to reviewing chocolate snack products. Today we again somewhat cut loose from our traditional chocolate reviews trying out @AmericanSoda's latest new range - Lenny & Larry's Muscle Brownies, a brand from the US that was started up by the American TV Gladiator 'Cyclone' - read the amusing backstory HERE

Lenny & Larry's products promote the idea of 'creating and distributing healthy baked goods that encourage physical fitness and a healthy diet'. Their existing range consists of cookies and brownies, the latter of which we got stuck in to today.

The team was lucky enough to be sent samples of all four flavours of the current 80.0g brownie range:

Triple Chocolate - Kcal 170 Fat 6.0g Fat(sats) 2.0g Carbs 19.0g (per 40.0g)
Peanut Butter - Kcal 170 Fat 6.0g Fat(sats) 2.0g Carbs 19.0g (per 40.0g)

Cookies & Cream - Kcal 170 Fat 5.0g Fat(sats) 1.0g Carbs 20.0g (per 40.0g)
Caramel Walnut - Kcal 170 Fat 6.0g Fat(sats) 2.0g Carbs 19.0g (per 40.0g)

We've given you the usual nutritional information above but I'm sure Lenny and Larry would say we've missed out the key information that makes really these standout as something different to your everyday brownie. Check out this marketing spiel: "20 grams of high quality protein, fresh baked, 4 great tasting flavors and 0 grams of trans fat, you will be a fan for life" ... now say it again in a macho, TV Gladiator voice :-)

Not wanting to turn out like Arnie circa 80/90s we decided to divide the task of trying these amongst the ChocolateMission team during one big tasting session. We first chilled all four in the ChocolateMission HQ fridge and then divided each of them into smaller bite sized chunks for sampling. As you can see from our copious amount of pics today the main differentiator between all the variants was the icing placed on top of each of the brownies. The frosting on top was the main carrier of the different flavours, though there were also additional chocolate flavoured chips, nuts and cookie pieces present amongst the actual brownies that helped establish the different flavour variants.

So which were our favourites? Well as you would suspect different members of the team had their own soft spots for different ones. The plainer taste individuals mostly enjoyed the Triple Chocolate brownie as the absence of nuts and pure chocolate focus was a big winner for them. Jim, being a Peanut Butter boy had preference to that variant. He did remark the brownie could have done with a moister form of peanut butter to loosen up the brownie cake a little but on the whole he was impressed by added saltiness of the peanut flavours.

The female members of the ChocolateMission tasting panel gravitated more towards the Cookies & Cream variant when it came to hoovering up the remaining pieces after the first round of testing. The crunchy cookie pieces within the brownie. combined with the vanilla icing went down a storm and it was praised all round by those that sampled it. Last but by no means least the Caramel Walnut came in for similar praise with the big pieces of walnut adding a nice crunchy element that flavour wise balanced the sweet as sin caramel icing with its more savoury style flavour base.

Overall we decided to give these Lenny & Larry's Muscle Brownies a collectively great score as we were impressed by the entire range. Despite being given the whole whey protein laden 'Muscle brownies' build up, when it came to the taste this really factored in very little as it was hard to tell that these were different to most other brownies with their freshly baked, chocolate cake taste none-to-dissimillar to your everyday brownie. Whilst we aren't advocates of promoting snacks for health benefiting reasons if you are a individual looking for a very tasty source of protein you can do very little wrong checking out Lenny & Larry's Muscle Brownie line-up. Even if you aren't aiming to be the next Mr Olympia 2013 (haha!!) these are seriously worth checking out if you are fans of brownies.

8.0 out of 10