Chocofruit: Possibly An Off-Brand Brownie

Brownie Basics

It’s that time of the week again, and with the sun beating down on London, I bought a vegan Oreo brownie from a stall called (checks notes) Chocofruit!

Brownie Backstory

The stall I was targeting this week sadly wasn’t there! I had to spring for my back-up option. I hope, brownie fans, that you appreciate the willpower it took me to not just go back and get another cheesecake brownie like last week. I have been feeling a little off today, and suspect that three days of cheap free coffee and hotel food hasn’t been the best thing for me, so perhaps it’s for the best that I had a reason to not over-indulge in such a delicious treat.

Chocofruit seems, from what I can work out, to mostly be a stall selling combinations of fruit and melted chocolate. It is not a million miles away from the frozen banana stand in Arrested Development, to be honest, although I’m not sure they would appreciate the comparison. There were a couple of cakes which I suspect were created as a bit of an afterthought: this was the only thing calling itself a brownie. It’s vegan and it has Oreos on it (which are themselves vegan).

Buying a brownie from Chocofruit is starting to poke flaws in my admittedly ad-hoc category system. I’m going to term this as a ‘bakery brownie’ for the time being, although this doesn’t seem like it’s really a business that you could call a bakery: its primary purpose still seems to be sweet treats so it’s close enough. It also for sure doesn’t fit into “coffee shop”, “sandwich shop”, “supermarket” or “restaurant” categories. It’s possible that some day I’ll come back and edit the category here if time has required a much wider range of brownie providers to be catered for, but for now, the frozen banana stand chocolate fruit stall is a ‘bakery’ for my purposes.

I ate this brownie halfway up the Royal Festival Hall steps, half full of chicken biryani, and here’s what I thought of it.

Brownie Points

Taste: Tastes fine I guess? I’m not a huge fan of Oreos (I find them somewhat overrated) so maybe that wasn’t a huge plus for me. I ate the whole thing, it filled a hole, but it was slightly on the bland side. 5/10

Texture: Look, this isn’t really a brownie. It’s a flat, dry and crumbly chocolate cake covered in stale Oreos. I guess it was good enough for me to eat it all, see above, but I’m pretty disappointed to be honest. 2/10

Presentation: It looks pretty good – let’s be positive about this! I think breaking the Oreos up irregularly was a good idea. Also, it was given to me in a little wooden boat, which you can see partly in the picture. 4/5

Value: It was £4. That’s a lot, as things go. To me, that exemplifies the problem here. Presumably they don’t sell many brownies (it’s just a side hustle compared to the chocofruits) so the price probably has to be high to justify making any. But the price being so high for such a crappy brownie is a bad look. 2/10

Fudge Factor: It’s a stall called Chocofruit, why is there no fruit in the chocolate brownie? Are they really that disinterested in the brownie? (Petty, maybe, but look, the score wasn’t going to be very high anyway) -1/5

Overall Total: 12

Should I Buy And Eat This Brownie?

Ehhh… no. Look, Chocofruit clearly have a thing going, and by all accounts the whole fruit-and-melted-chocolate thing is really good and delicious. Go eat some of their fruit covered in chocolate. Don’t get the brownie.

Closing Thought

Why was there a phase in like 2007/8 where a bunch of indie bands had backing vocals that just consisted of someone yelling the lyrics tunelessly? And: should we bring that back?