Pret A Manger: First Post!

Brownie Basics

Here is the standard chocolate brownie you get at Pret A Manger. It’s chocolate and a brownie.

Brownie Backstory

So basically what happened here is that my friend told me I should write a blog about brownies. I’m not exactly a master brownie baker, nor any kind of proper food critic, but I do love brownies and I have a lot of #opinions about brownies. I have eaten a lot of brownies. Some delicious, some disappointing. Mostly chocolate. I may not know that much about brownies (or baking in general) but I know what I like.

On the day my friend had this idea, I got drunk (unrelated) and bought a bunch of brownies, to eat and then talk about on my soon-to-be brownie blog. Then, because I was drunk, I got distracted by eating the brownies and forgot to set up the blog. But today I’m sober! And here is my first post about a brownie I bought and ate.

I grabbed this from London Waterloo station on the way home from work. As Pret is a large-ish chain I think it’s safe to assume that this brownie is representative of a brownie from any Pret. Pret of course has a wide variety of sandwiches, sweet treats and other food items available (God, what is this? Am I an advert for Pret?) but for some reason I’d never had their chocolate brownie before. Well, not before the night I got drunk and ate one. So this is my second.

Brownie Points

This is the section where I assign a points value to different qualities of the brownie in a highly scientific and not-at-all arbitrary way.

Taste: This tastes pretty good! It feels like it has a high cocoa content, and it’s not overly sweet – brownies like this commonly overcompensate for not being very good by piling in the sugar. There are some chocolate chips in it and their taste gets overpowered by the rest of the brownie, but this isn’t a dealbreaker. A solid 7/10

Texture: One of the most important features of a brownie, and I was really pleasantly surprised by this one. It’s not cakey, and it’s not overly fudgy either. It feels soft and melty in the mouth, and here the chocolate chips enhance the experience by adding the occasional slight bite to it. 8/10

Presentation: I’m not a good photographer, but you can see above that it looks like… an entirely standard brownie. I feel like I have to knock a point off because it came in an unnecessary amount of packaging, being wrapped in plastic and then containing a cardboard insert inside that as well. This is from a sandwich/coffee shop with a bunch of pastries and cakes sitting out under the counter as normal, so I’m not convinced that the brownies (and some others) need to be individually wrapped twice! 2/5

Value: I paid £1.69 for this. Whether or not you think that’s a lot of money (for what it is) will depend on a lot of things, such as “do you live in London?” and “do you have a full-time job?” and “do you keep your money in a giant vault so you can go swimming in it sometimes?” I feel like it’s not a lot for a coffee shop brownie, and that’s probably partly because it’s really quite little for a chocolate shop brownie. It tastes pretty good, it’s pretty small, I’m going to say it’s about average value with a score of 5/10

Fudge Factor: So this is a joke, you see? Because fudge, like fudge brownies? But also a ‘fudge factor’ is a phrase in science (or possibly ‘science’) to describe a number or term you add to an equation when you think know what the answer is and for some reason you haven’t got it correctly. It’s the extra points I’m going to add to a score for whatever reason I feel like.
Overall, I was more impressed with the Pret brownie than I expected to be, so it can have a 3/5

Final Count-brown(ie): 25

Should I Buy And Eat This Brownie?

You could certainly do a lot worse! If you’re in/near/going to a Pret and get a hankering for a chocolate brownie, I say heck yeah. If you specifically want a smaller bite of brownie, this is a particularly good choice. Otherwise, I wouldn’t suggest going out of your way to get one.

Closing Thought

The timeline in X-Men: Apocalypse makes no sense.