Great Value Caramel Molten Cake - A Product Review

My husband was at Wal-Mart and was looking for a sweet treat for the family when he found Great Value Molten Cake for only $1.50 each. He bought the chocolate variety of these single serving cakes for himself and our daughter, and the caramel kind for me.

The box for Great Value Caramel Molten Cake is rather generic looking, with blue and brown print. In small black print we are told that the cake is "topped with caramel and toffee pieces". There is a lovely picture of the product inside, a little bundt cake overflowing with caramel sauce.

Great Value Caramel Molten Cake was easy to prepare. You just remove it from the packaging and place on a microwave safe dish. The instructions then say to microwave for 40 seconds or until warm. (It took about twice that long to heat in our microwave, so be aware that there is quite a bit of variance.) Then you let the product cool a bit (the sauce is hotter than the cake) and dig in.

I must say that Great Value Caramel Molten Cake was much better than I expected it to be! I have had some mini cakes and pies that were pretty stale and tasteless, but this was an exception. The texture of the cake is moist and soft, somewhere between a pound cake and a Twinkie. The flavor was like a good white cake, but a bit nuttier. The caramel is warm, buttery and rich. I will say it is a tad waxy, but not enough to hurt the overall flavor. With just the right balance of salty and sweet, and a light, buttery richness, the flavor of Great Value Caramel Molten Cake hits all over the tongue.

The one disappointment was the sparseness of the toffee pieces. The smattering of pieces I found had very little discernable difference in their flavor. Most of them may have melted into the caramel sauce and added to the overall flavor. As I didn't pay enough attention before cooking, I just don't know. In all honesty, though, the cake didn't really lack anything for their absence.

As I said in the beginning, Great Value Caramel Molten Cake is sold in single servings of about 4.75 ounces. But when I saw the calorie content was 530 calories and that each cake had 34 percent of my daily-recommended allowance of saturated fat, I decided to eat only half. If you eat the whole cake however, you do get a modest amount of dietary positives: 6 grams of protein, 3 percent of your daily recommended intake of dietary fiber, 4 percent of your daily recommended intake of vitamin A, 6 percent of your daily recommended intake of calcium, 15 percent of your daily recommended intake of thiamin, 8 percent of your daily recommended intake of niacin, 15 percent of your daily recommended intake of iron, and 15 percent of your daily recommended intake of riboflavin. Not bad, but nothing that makes that makes up for having that many calories and that much fat.

So if you are looking for a good warm desert that's easy to prepare, I highly recommend Great Value Caramel Molten Cake. It's a lot of decadence for a dollar and a half. But if you are counting calories, just walk away!!

Enjoy!