Dunkin' Donuts Pumpkin Cheesecake Squares

Everyone loves pumpkin, especially when it's square.

Happy National Coffee Day! If you're reading at this hour, you clearly took part in some of the giveaways that were scheduled.

I myself grabbed some free coffee from Dunkin' Donuts on the way to work. But I felt a little guilty leaving the store paying nothing, so I snagged a doughnut — which is what they want when they offer the free java.

Regardless of whether I capitulated to consumerism prompted by corporate-induced guilt, the pastry I picked up is worth writing about. It was a seasonal special Pumpkin Cheesecake Square. As you can guess, the shape was square. The filling was pumpkin cheesecake cream.

The topping, meanwhile, proved to be some mess of too-sweet orange-and-white icing along with cardboard crumbles ... I mean graham cracker crumbles. They tasted like cardboard, so call them what you will, and I'll call them what I want.

Fortunately for Dunkin', the pumpkin cheesecake filling was enough to overcome the disaster up top. While it was sweet, it wasn't as sweet as you'd expect from Dunkin'. I'm guessing the cheesecake factor mellowed things a bit. The flavor ended with a note that came closer to approaching savory pumpkin than I'd ever have guessed.

They should really just glaze these things. But they're still worth a try, even given the outrageous premium Dunkin' charges for the mere privilege of misspelling the word "doughnut." You know I'm a sucker for pumpkin, but these still deserve a solid three sporks out of five.

The Great Burger Battle: Five Guys vs. Shake Shack vs. McDonald's

A carnivore's dream: Five Guys, Shake Shack and McDonald's, all on one plate.

We live in a golden age of hamburgers.

From the plethora of fast food options to the growing sub genre of "fast casual" joints to the fancier fare at non-chain restaurants, people are doing things with ground beef patties that have seldom been done in American history. Find a burger joint in just about any town these days and chances are you can top with something glamorous like a fried egg, avocado or candied bacon. And that's to say nothing of the higher-quality meats, buns and cheeses hitting the bun in recent years.

Some friends recently came up with the idea to do a burger taste-off, and your favorite food critic just couldn't resist joining. All told there were six of us sitting around the table — yours truly and Deb, the official wife of Rick's Food Critique, were joined by two other couples who play weekly trivia with us, Andrea and Jay, and Jon and Robin.

We grabbed takeout from three different restaurants readily available at the Inner Harbor in our home of Baltimore: Mainstay Five Guys was a clear choice to square off against a newly opened Shake Shack, and we decided to throw in McDonald's for comparison's sake. Options available in other parts of the city like Smashburger weren't considered for this particular competition, nor were non-chain restaurants. They'll have to wait for a future test.

Each couple decided what to order from each restaurant, so specific burger types and toppings varied. We won't list them all here, but you can safely assume just about everyone had a burger near their ideal from each restaurant, along with fries. The luckiest of us also had shakes from Shake Shack.

So who won? As you'd expect, that depends who you ask. But it was clear that McDonald's came in a distant third. We went with the classic Quarter Pounder with Cheese, and the cheese consistently scored poorly. The burger's bun also took a beating, becoming the point of comparison when someone wanted to insult one of the other place's bread.

As for the fries, long a point of pride for McDonald's, things only got worse. I personally felt they were drowning in salt, and they quickly turned limp and soggy. But their appearance next to Five Guys' and Shake Shack's fries was most disturbing. Jay put it best, saying, "They're so much paler than the others."

It was a much closer race between the other two burger joints. Shake Shack got some first-place votes, but it's my firm belief the burger deserves to be in the runner-up slot. It has a bunch of great qualities, like delicious Shack Sauce, flavorful meat and a buttery bun. It also scored highly for being the only burger without weak iceberg lettuce on top, opting for heartier greens. But the ratio between bun and meat was all off, with too much bread and too little burger. Some also felt the buttery bun went a stop too far, leaving it drowning in too much lard.

Shake Shack does deserve kudos for crinkly fries that keep their crispness all evening. And those shakes are truly worth the obscene prices the restaurant charges. They're thick, flavorful and hard to put down. If you're not pairing fries and a shake with your burger, you're doing Shake Shack wrong. It's almost like they knew what they were talking about when they named the place.

Finally, my winner was Five Guys. In short, its burger showcases the meat and tastes freshest to me. A few attacked the bun for not holding up to the grease and toppings, but I personally like the fact that it's there solely to provide a handle while you taste the good stuff in between. And I can't help but give bonus points for the sheer variety of toppings you choose from the menu.

Five Guys fries are an interesting study. They're virtually always soggy, but they're not repulsive the way McDonald's fries turn when they start to droop. Maybe it's the fresh potatoes, or maybe it's just a better oil. Either way, they're just as good as Shake Shack's, but for different reasons.

Not all of my co-judges agree with my rankings, but frankly this isn't their blog. I've avoided targeting any opinions with which I disagree — which you could also call wrong opinions — and hopefully we won't be ending any friendships over this. At the end of the day, I'm giving the spork of recommendation to Five Guys' burgers and Shake Shack's shakes.

All you really need to know is that you should skip the Mickey D's, though. The other two options will leave you much happier.

Yuengling's Black & Tan Ice Cream is worth dishing on

The Yuengling family has brewed up a great ice cream idea.

Today might just be the hottest day of the summer — time for some ice cream.

And what a batch of ice cream do we have to taste: Yuengling's Black & Tan. Yes, that's Yuengling as in the Pennsylvania folks who make the green bottled beer that half the country wishes it could buy.

As the story on the back of the ice cream carton goes, the Yuengling family started a dairy operation during Prohibition when they couldn't sell strong suds on the up-and-up. That creamy business continued for nearly seven decades before being phased out at some point. Then recently, they decided to bring it back.

Thank goodness they decided to milk this line of business further.

I'm no aficionado of fancy ice cream — Ben & Jerry's is fine, but I'd just as soon have a bigger crate of cheaper stuff. Yuengling, however, has made a tremendous creamy, filling, rich frozen treat that's equally perfect for a quick midday cool down or end-of-night bowl. In short, it's rich without being too rich.

My flavor of choice, the black and tan, swirls Belgian chocolate with salted caramel in the same container. Both are exquisite, with the chocolate exhibiting some bitter tones and the caramel tending more toward the sweet than the salt.

Still, the caramel side really shines. Just when you think it's getting too sweet, there's a kick of NaCl to bring you back to the table.

If you're looking for downsides, pricing and sizing are the only things you'll find. The Yuengling carton is smaller than your standard ice cream carton, measuring a quart. It's a bit pricier, too. Let's just say I didn't get as much change back from a $5 bill as I'd have liked.

Still, I'd call it a small price to pay. Cheers to Yuengling's ice cream, which churns out an extremely impressive four sporks out of five.

Remembering Mr. Robert C. Moyer

"Periscope" Adviser Robert C. Moyer as he appeared in the 2005 yearbook.

Mr. Robert C. Moyer died at the age of 70 on May 16, 2015. He was a most important mentor.

He was the first person to teach me about newspaper reporting, back when I was on the staff of my high school student rag. As such, I'll refer to him in proper second-reference style today: Moyer.

Without Moyer, there would be no food critique. Thanks to his role as adviser of the Carlisle High School monthly newspaper Periscope, I started writing cafeteria critiques when I was in the 11th grade. They ran until I graduated, and they were enough fun that I kept the idea alive reviewing inexpensive food on this blog. A decade later, I still write reviews when I can find a few spare minutes and a worthy subject, simply because it's so much fun.

I would also be in a different professional field without Moyer. I'm a newspaper reporter today because of his early instruction. He taught me the inverted pyramid in a high school classroom. He edited my work with a wise but unyielding red pen. He taught me to count headline characters, a skill that has been critical at times over the years, even in an age when computers should have streamlined that process long ago. He wrote a letter of recommendation to get me into college.

More importantly, Moyer taught me that you can have fun every day in your life, even when you have work to do. You can joke with people and show them you value and care about them. We would all do well to conduct ourselves as he did.

When I was a senior in high school, I won an essay contest from the Daughters of the American Revolution, a women's service organization focused on patriotism and history. Anyone could enter the contest, but as an 18-year-old high school male, my winning opened me up for plenty of daughter jokes.

Moyer — a teacher — was the first to make those jokes. I remember walking into his classroom the day I won to see him beaming with a smile that was about 90 percent pride and 10 percent imp. He started by saying that my award was a great honor and that the Daughters of the American Revolution was a prestigious organization.

Then he proceeded to call me Carlisle High School's own daughter of the American Revolution. It was a joke he'd return to many times, usually in the middle of a group discussion in class, and usually when my teenage self needed to be cut down to size just a little bit.

That was far from the only such joke Moyer made, and I was far from the only subject. He had a way of using humor like that to include everyone in a conversation. You never felt targeted by his jokes. You felt embraced by them. At the end of the day, you knew he valued you and supported you.

If you got Moyer to talk about the classes he taught, he'd tell you some of his favorites were on the non-college preparatory track. He'd been in his position long enough that he could have picked all of the top classes, never interacting with the kids who weren't bound for big-name schools or prestigious scholarships.

He didn't do that, at least in part because he recognized the value of every single person in the school. He wanted to interact with those bound for all walks of life, and he enjoyed getting to know them. Again, we'd all do well to learn from him there.

I could share a dozen more memories of Moyer, but I'll end with two. The first is when I had graduated from college and returned to town to cover Carlisle for The Harrisburg Patriot-News. I ran into Moyer in a diner one day, and he pumped my hand emphatically and said he'd been reading my byline.

Now, I've been told by someone that they're reading my byline at least 50 times over my short career. The only instance I truly believed it was when I met Moyer in that diner.

The second memory I want to share is from when I was a senior in high school and different media outlets were doing human interest stories on my cafeteria critique column. It started with the Patriot-News writing about it, then the AP did a story, then a radio station, and I ended up doing a cable television hit.

Moyer was clearly proud. He was clearly having fun. But he also used the moment to remind us all that you never know what story will be picked up and run with by the press.

Coming from anyone else, that lesson could have ruined the experience by reminding me my 15 minutes of fame were nothing more than happenstance. But somehow, Moyer helped me reflect on the time in a way that made me value it more.

Here's a quote from Moyer that appeared in the AP story about my cafeteria critique:

“I enjoy the column, and I’ve never eaten the cafeteria food.”

I don't know if he ever ended up eating the cafeteria food. But today I want to raise a spork to Moyer. I'm so glad we crossed paths, and so sorry you left us all too soon.