Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Product Review: Jell-O Mousse Temptations: Dark Chocolate Decadence

This is going to sound funny coming from a man, but the first thing about these pudding cups that caught my attention was that they were only 60 calories each. I personally don't care. But Leann has trouble finding snacks that are yummy but also low in calories. Jell-O certainly used a lot of buzzwords: mousse, dark chocolate, decadence, temptations. I showed them to Leann and she consciously or subconsciously responded to the buzzwords. So I bought them for her. Even though they were for her, she let me try one.


My verdict: I like regular pudding better. The flavor was fine, but the texture detracted from the overall experience for me. Since these were mousse, they were "fluffy" and "airy" (more buzzwords), which I didn't find enjoyable at all. I like my pudding thick and heavy.[1]


And, just for fun, here are the chemical structures of vanillin (left), the major flavor component of vanilla, and piperonal (right), a significant but minor flavor component of vanilla).[2][3]


Notes:

[1] Etymologically, this makes the most sense since our word pudding is possibly related to the Middle Low German term puddich, which means "fat, corpulent, swollen, thick, stumpy, etc." This can also be seen in the English word "pudgy". See The Oxford English Dictionary, Third Edition (2007), pudding n (etymology).

[2] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanillin and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piperonal.

[3] This may not be readily apparent, but if you rotate the image of the piperonal 90° counterclockwise and rotate the CH3 on the vanillin so that it points down from the O, you'll see how similar these two molecules are: they only differ by a single C—O bond and two hydrogens.

Image attribution:

The chemical structure of vanillin is by NEUROtiker, available at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vanillin2.svg.

The chemical structure of piperonal is by NEUROtiker, available at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Piperonal.svg.

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