A cool reception for Dunkin' Donuts Frozen Hot Chocolate

Yesterday I struggled to prepare notes and sort my ideas for a review of two varieties of flavored Cheerios. Techniques that have served me since grade school failed to put my thoughts in order. Outlines, idea webs and note cards all failed me.

Suddenly insight burst forth into my head like a cold water balloon: We're in the middle of a massive heat wave sending the mercury arching into triple-digit territory. No one wants to eat breakfast or even talk about it. Foodies just want something cold to take on the sizzling temperatures outside.

I'm no different from any other foodie, so a quick change of gears saw me at Dunkin' Donuts ordering a Frozen Hot Chocolate. A few sips and I needed no idea web to tell me I had one incongruous beverage in my hands.

You could fry an egg on top of a car Saturday, but the Frozen Hot Chocolate kept things from boiling over.

The Frozen Hot Chocolate is little more than an icy example of contradictions. The one in the name is nothing more than a gimmick -- there's obviously nothing hot about this drink, and it would be better named a slushy, or, in Dunkin' Donuts speak, a Chocolate Coolatta.

Moving beyond the label, the flavor unleashes its own set of discrepancies. At first sip, the Frozen Hot Chocolate comes off as intensely sweet and packed with chocolate. It's impossible to keep from immediately sucking up every liquid drop within reach of the straw. Once all the fluid has found its way into your mouth, however, you're left with half a cup of bland ice.

Give it time, and that ice melts into a tepid brown fluid with just a hint of cocoa. The resulting beverage contains just enough vapid flavor to leave you longing for a shot of Hershey's syrup.

At a fundamental level this isn't a problem unique to the Frozen Hot Chocolate. The end of slushies are classically painful experiences, unless you happen to love pastel chunks of ice drained of all their initial syrupy flavor. I harbor absolutely no love for that ice, and I actually find the Frozen Hot Chocolate to be a step below its fruit-slushy brethren at this stage of the sipping game.

While the end of fruit slushies leaves me longing for the strong sugar of a fresh slushy, the end of the Frozen Hot Chocolate had me wishing I'd ordered a milk shake instead. The recently melted chocolate-milk doppelganger in the bottom of my cup left my palate crying out for richness, a richness I quickly realized never actually existed in the Frozen Hot Chocolate. Sure, it was sweet. Yet all that sugar only covered up a lack of depth.

We have an outline for trouble any time the end of a drink makes you wish you'd ordered something else. Things start out all right before dissolving into a lackluster effort worthy of just two sporks out of five.

If you want to order and actually enjoy the Frozen Hot Chocolate, I'd recommend drinking half of it and chucking the rest. The first part of the drink is a completely different story from the second, and maybe you can keep your tongue from ever realizing the depth of flavor it's missing -- you're better off without that flash of insight.

Hot McChocolate

Before taking you down the culinary journey that is today's food review, I would like to take a not-so-brief paragraph to mention that I've recently finished my undergraduate degree at Syracuse University. Not that I'm bragging, mind you. I only want to point out that in addition to my lifelong love of flavor and everyman eye toward food, I can now add a real-life college education to the list of traits that qualify me as a food critic. So read on, secure in the knowledge that this reviewer has received the stamp of approval from a fully accredited post-secondary institution! (That stamp didn't have anything to do with my food reviews, but we need not mind that.)

I've spent my last two blog posts reviewing coffee. But what about all of you out there whose palates reject java? What about those of you shivering in the bitter cold who just don't like bitter drinks -- those of you who need something sweet, like hot chocolate?

There is a big bad world of hot chocolate out there, and you need guidance. Well, fear not. I'm going to tackle the issue by taking on one of the newest and most perplexing hot chocolates: McDonald's.

And it is perplexing. McDonald's hot chocolate has some sort of a "McCafe" branding. It includes cappuccino, mocha and other fancy coffee-and-milk drinks that you usually buy in Starbucks. Plus it comes in a fancy dressed-up paper cup with a robust lid.

We'll come back to that lid in a bit. First, let's describe the hot chocolate that's inside the cup. It's sweet. Really sweet. So sweet that it leaves you wanting a bottle of water to alternate with sips of the hot cocoa. So sweet that I'm just going to say it again: it's sweet.

On top of that super-sweet hot chocolate is a big layer of whipped cream topped with drizzles of chocolate syrup. And here's where the lid comes in. Why are there chocolate syrup drizzles on a beverage that's served with a lid? The drizzles are used to improve the presentation of a drink or dessert, not to add any real flavor. This drink is already on sweet overload, so they're doubly superfluous.

Plus, there is far too much whipped cream for a lidded drink. The fun of whipped cream on hot chocolate is leaving it on top while you burrow your lips down to sip the beverage, thereby leaving you with a whipped cream mustache. But with a lid, you don't get that chance. It filters out all the whipped cream, leaving you wishing you could look like Santa with a whipped-cream Burt Reynolds-inspired mustache.

On top of those problems, the hot chocolate is apparently only available in medium. At least that's what the worker who waited on me said: "It's only in medium, I guess."

She was staring at her touchscreen looking surprised that there is no large hot chocolate. Just like I'm staring at my computer screen now, perplexed at the thought. Maybe a large cup of hot McChocolate is enough sweetness and sugar to blast you immediately into type II diabetes.

The drink might be sweet, but I'm not sweet on it. One spork out of five. McDonald's hot chocolate isn't big, but it is bad.