Starbucks: A Little Pre-Brownie Brownie

Brownie Basics

Where there’s coffee, there’s usually brownie. Starbucks does coffee.

Brownie Backstory

Sometimes this backstory section is about the process of me deciding to buy/buying/eating the brownie, sometimes it’s about the context of the brownie or brownie provider, sometimes it’s an unrelated ramble about something else entirely.

In this case it’s sort of the first two. I have mentioned before that I felt like saving Starbucks: not for anything in particular, but because Starbucks is a reasonably good fall-back (there’s Starbucks everywhere, you see, and they all have brownies). Of course since I’m not currently posting on any particular schedule – certainly no longer keeping to anything like the once-a-day I was trying to do at the time – I don’t really know what I’m apparently saving Starbucks for?

Well, the other day I popped into Starbucks for a coffee with a colleague, and discovered something I wasn’t expecting: Starbucks now has another brownie! It’s ‘cookies & cream’, and let me tell you, it looks great. I am super excited to buy it and eat it and blog about it! However, it seems unfair to do so without first trying the Starbucks ‘regular’ chocolate brownie, so as to have a good point of comparison. That seemed like a good reason to finally eat that Starbucks brownie. So, this evening, that’s exactly what I did.

Starbucks something something big international coffee chain etc. Let’s rate a brownie!

Brownie Points

Taste: I like it. There’s large lumps of chocolate in it that taste like good chocolate, and this permeates the whole thing. It’s not particularly sweet but I think that helps bring out the chocolate. 7/10

Texture: This brownie made me realise that I really like biting into big pieces of chocolate in a brownie, because of how much I enjoyed that here. Aside from that, it’s a little too dry on the outsides, but it has the same quality of the Esquires brownie where it becomes much denser and fudgier than you’d think after the first chew. Perhaps a little too thick, but also good. 7/10

Presentation: Standard brownie, nothing exciting. 2/5

Value: £1.85 for what I found to be six bites of brownie (I counted). So it’s kind of small, but bigger than Caffè Nero’s brownie and so much better than Costa’s brownie (if we’re going to compare coffee chains here). It’s not amazing value, but I think it is good value. 7/10

Fudge Factor: A lotta coffee shops would stir some chocolate chips into a brownie batter and call it a day. Starbucks seems to have taken a slab of chocolate, hit it with a hammer a couple of times, thrown it in and gone “Job done”. It’s a bold texture choice and I liked it. 2/5

Star Power: 25

Should I Buy And Eat This Brownie?

I’m fully expecting to come back to this blog in a couple of days and report that the ‘cookies & cream’ brownie is better than this for the same price. I mean, if it’s not better, I’ll be honestly disappointed.

If my expectations are proven correct, then it’ll be hard for me to recommend this brownie unconditionally. What I will say is: this was a good brownie, good enough that assuming you’re in a Starbucks and you only see this brownie on offer, you should totally go for it.

Closing Thought

Recently I had the opportunity to do something I have been wondering about for a little while: I had another Pret A Manger brownie, partly to see how much (if at all) I’d drifted away from my original assessment and score. As it turns out, I pretty much agreed! I didn’t try to actually re-score it for direct comparison (I was eating it at a casual social event) but in my head I felt that I had maybe overrated it the first time, and upon a second eating I decided that wasn’t the case. So, you know, that’s cool.