You wouldn’t think it, because of how filling a few slices can be, but pizza is wanting for sides. Something about pizza just doesn’t feel complete. It has all the same basic ingredients as a burger — meat, cheese, sauce — but somehow doesn’t make a full meal. Wings, while a good addition, are perhaps a little too filling, and adding an order to the side of your pizza makes it so that you constantly have to decide which is more deserving of whatever room is left in your stomach.
That’s not the vibe — nobody wants to stress over whether they should be eating another wing or another slice of pizza. Garlic knots and cheese bread, while sensible options, feel redundant; it’s just pizza without the good stuff. This brings us to the salad. Salad is the best accompaniment to pizza, but busting out a knife, fork, and bowl while you’re eating finger food can be unnecessarily cumbersome.
So what we need is an extra little snack that is just as easy to eat, requires only our hands, and pairs well with the salty flavors of pizza. And now Little Caesars thinks they have the answer to our dilemma with their new M&M’s Minis Cookie Dough Brownie.
The M&M’s Minis Cookie Dough Brownie was tested late last year across Tennessee, Virginia, Mississippi, and Kentucky, under the name Kooky Dough Brownie. We’re glad they changed the name because that means I don’t have to spend a paragraph roasting them over how stupid it is. Anyway, it looks like the test launch was a success as now the snack is available at all Little Caesar’s outlets nationwide for just $3.60 under its new, better name.
So has Little Caesar’s finally solved our pizza-side-order dilemma? Let’s find out.
M&M’s Minis Cookie Dough Brownie
As I alluded to earlier, I like the name of this thing because it telegraphs what exactly it is we’re eating — it’s a brownie topped with a layer of cookie dough and M&M’s Minis. Simple. Flavorwise, this snack smacks you with sweetness and has a slightly salty flavor on the backend which ping pongs back to sweetness courtesy of the generous topping of M&M’s Minis. It doesn’t have that dense richness I expect from a good brownie, instead what I got was much airier and more focused on the cookie dough half of the snack, which can be overwhelmingly sweet.
The crunch provided from the M&Ms is a nice addition and brings back some of the chocolate flavors that are masked by the cookie dough, but ultimately it just adds to the sweetness, which is something this brownie needs less of — something I thought I’d never say about a brownie.
Each order comes with four cookie dough brownies which are each 210 calories with 17g of sugar. That’s quite the snack, not quite as sugary as a soda (which is also a must with pizza) but more calories than your average can of Coke. I took the liberty of measuring this brownie, because why not, and found that it measured out to two inches by two inches, and is one and one-half inches high, with the brownie portion occupying almost a whole inch.
That doesn’t sound like a big snack, but trust me, this thing is so overly sweet that it’s kind of hard to get through that small square.
The Bottom Line
Overall, I think the M&M’s Minis Cookie Dough Brownie tastes pretty good but served alongside pizza, it’s just too damn sweet. The idea of eating one of these after a few slices of pizza seems crazy (especially if you like beer or soda to accompany your pie) unless what you’re aiming for is a stomachache. Instead, put these in the fridge and eat one cold a few hours after dinner — that’s more viable.
Sounds like we’ll have to keep looking for the perfect pizza pairing partner (other than beer, that is). The search continues!
