Obviously, it’s been more than a week since my last post. And this post isn’t going to be about our late cat, Penelope, as promised a month ago. It’s been a busy, frustrating month for me, and when I didn’t have other obligations getting in the way of blogging, I just didn’t have the energy for it.
One thing we recently did that wasn’t so frustrating was spending a few days at Disneyland. We had planned on our trip last January being our last trip to Disneyland for at least a year, but circumstances conspired to bring us to the LA area a couple more times, making this latest visit our third one this year. And I’m going back in a few weeks for a fourth, but that really will be the last one until 2020. Unless it isn’t. This time, we set a specific goal of trying as many of the Halloween special snacks the parks are currently serving, so this week, I’ll be talking about which ones we ate and what we thought of them.
The first snack we tried was the Mummy croissant donut from Schmoozie’s, filled with peanut butter and jelly.
I feel like I should have put something else in the photo for scale, because this was not a small item. It was probably six inches long, and once we got past the weirdness of a snack staring back at us, it was delicious. There seemed to be an adequate mix of peanut butter and grape jelly filling, so that neither overwhelmed the other. As tends to be the case with snacks like this, the fillings weren’t completely evenly distributed, but it was close enough. We felt like we were starting our snack journey on a high note.
Also available at Schmoozie’s are a bat-shaped whoopie pie and a caramel apple smoothie. We didn’t try either of these; the smoothie was huge, and we had a lot of sugar consumption ahead of us. And if I’m honest, I don’t even recall seeing the whoopie pie.
Our next stop was the Cozy Cone Motel in Cars Land. We had eaten there once before, for breakfast, and were not impressed. This time, I wanted to try the slow burnin’ mac & cheese cone, which consisted of mac & cheese with a spicy red pepper sauce, topped with chili cheese puff crumbs, and served in a black bread cone.
We liked this much better than the breakfast cone we had tried years ago. The mac & cheese tasted like it was made with real cheese, not some goopy plastic cheese. The red pepper sauce was tasty without being too spicy. Between that and the cheese puff crumbs, it had some nice zip without being too spicy for my wife’s tastes. Once we finished the macaroni, we tried eating the bread cone. It tasted okay when there was still some sauce coating the inside, but on its own, it was just kind of bland. The black color was kind of cool, though.
Next on the agenda was the spicy pepper jack cheese stick from Corn Dog Castle. The description from the menu is, “Dipped in Corn Batter, drizzled with Blackberry Sauce and topped with Sweet Pineapple Salsa, Pickled Serranos and crushed Cheese Puffs.” Unfortunately, somehow we had gotten the idea that this also had a hot dog in it (that's how it was described on the Disney Food Blog Halloween foods checklist), and were disappointed to discover that wasn’t the case.
Regardless, we are big fans of melted cheese, so despite our disappointment, we still enjoyed it. I got to have all the pickled serranos, too; they were too spicy for my wife's taste.
After the cheese stick, we had fast passes for Radiator Springs Racers, so we stopped on the way at Flo’s V8 Cafe for a candy cone pie and a pumpkin spice shake.
The candy cone pie was about the size of a large cupcake, with a lot of buttercream (or some other kind of cream) on top and butterscotch and white chocolate pudding inside. I often find brightly colored buttercream to taste mostly like chemicals, but this didn’t. Also, it wasn’t huge, which was a plus since we were trying as many holiday snacks as we could.
The pumpkin spice shake tasted fine, too. My wife is a bigger pumpkin spice fan than me, but I didn’t find the flavor to be overwhelming.
Our next stop was at the Pacific Wharf Cafe for bacon cheddar ale soup in a bread bowl, and pumpkin bread pudding.
The soup (which isn’t listed on their menu as a Halloween offering) was really good; thick and hearty. And they had scooped out plenty of the bread to make room for the soup; the last time we had soup in a bread bowl at Disneyland, there was a lot more bread bowl and a lot less soup.
We were less enamored of the bread pudding. It had espresso caramel on it, and the coffee flavor kind of overwhelmed the pumpkin spice flavor. It was okay, but we probably wouldn’t order it again.
As regular readers of this blog know, I love hot dogs, so I had to try the Oktoberfest Dog from Award Wieners. The description reads, “Kielbasa Sausage topped with Caramelized Onions, Sauerkraut, Oktoberfest Beer Cheese, and Green Onions.” It doesn’t say that the sausage is spicy, which it is. It was too spicy for my wife, plus she’s not a big sauerkraut fan, so I got to eat most of this myself. We did get the filmstrip fries with the Oktoberfest topping (basically the same toppings as the hot dog) and she did enjoy those.
To make up for her not getting much of the hot dog, we ordered the pumpkin spice funnel cake fries for her. They were really good, but we forgot to take a photo of them. And that was the end of our eating for our first day.
The first holiday snack of the following day was another hot dog, this time from the Refreshment Corner on Main Street. This hot dog was topped with spicy meatballs, cheese sauce, and oven-roasted tomatoes. Unlike the Oktoberfest dog, these meatballs weren’t really all that spicy, so my wife happily ate them. I’m a huge fan of garnishing meat with other meat, like pastrami on a pastrami burger, or hot dogs on the picnic burger at Carl’s Jr a number of years ago, so meatballs on my hot dog tasted just fine. i would definitely order this again.
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| I was so excited about this hot dog, I had to take a bite before I took a photo |
Unfortunately, we had also ordered a cream cheese filled pretzel—one of my wife’s favorite Disneyland snacks—and they gave us a jalapeño pretzel instead. We didn’t notice until after we had taken a couple of bites, and felt like we had eaten too much to return it. So that was frustrating, because my wife does not like jalapeños at all.
To make up for the pretzel disappointment, we went next door to the Jolly Holiday Bakery and ordered a sweet potato hand pie. We had seen this online, and thought it looked just like a pop tart with marshmallows on it. That’s what it looked like when we ordered it, too, only maybe a little bigger than a pop tart. However, it surprised us a bit: the sweet potato filling was very nice, the crust was softer than I expected, and the orange fondant on top didn’t have the disgusting sugar plus chemicals flavor we thought it might. I still would have preferred if it were more like a Hostess fruit pie, though.
Our next holiday treat was the spam musubi from Bengal Barbecue. We rarely eat at Bengal Barbecue, having been disappointed in the past. Well, this lived up to our previous experiences; unlike the musubi we get from our local Hawaiian barbecue, this was served cold. Additionally, the rice wasn’t seasoned at all, so it tasted very bland. (Actually, I should point out that there was a concentrated spot of seasoning at one point, indicating that it might have been okay if whoever made it had really cared about what they were doing.) The slaw was all right, I guess, but overall, this was maybe the biggest disappointment of the day.
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| It didn't come with a bite taken out of it; I forgot to take the photo before I tried it |
On top of the low quality, the service was pretty lousy as well. I had placed a mobile order, and was waiting a while while they gave food out to almost everyone else in the park, I felt like. I had also ordered a bottle of water, and had seen them set that aside. When they finally received a tray of orders, including several orders of musubi, I figured mine had to be among them. But they never called my name. I saw a lone musubi sitting on a tray, showed them my order, and asked if it was mine. The server said it was not, but then asked my name. She looked up the order and saw that it was mine, so she gave it to me, without my water. When I asked for my water as well, she kind of rolled her eyes before handing it to me.
I know that Bengal Barbecue is a popular place to eat, and now it’s easier, since they added a seating area. But it’s still probably not going to ever be on our must-do list.
Our final Disneyland holiday treat for the day was the orange sugar skull chocolate pot au creme from Rancho del Zocalo. The orange sugar skull on top just tasted like white chocolate, and I honestly thought that the rest of the dessert would just be chocolate pudding with a pretentious name. However, there was chocolate cake in the middle of the pudding.
Unlike Bengal Barbecue, we love Rancho del Zocalo, and agreed that this was another winner from one of our favorite restaurants.
The only Disneyland treats we tried the next day were from the Jolly Holiday Bakery again. I got the graveyard cupcake, which had a cherry filling and a chocolate tombstone on top. It was delicious. My wife got the spiced bundt cake (which we did not photograph), which she felt was just okay.
Honestly, I don’t know that they were as spicy as described, but they were spicy enough that I tasted some heat. I wish that the pork belly was a little less thoroughly cooked, and maybe a little more tender and juicy. But, overall, I really enjoyed these.
Our final holiday treat was the anti-vampire pizza from Boardwalk Pizza and Pasta, which was a chicken pizza with roasted garlic sauce. I don’t think we’ve ever gotten food from this place before, but it was pretty good. I would definitely recommend this pizza.
And that’s it for the Halloween treats we tried at the Disneyland Resort last week. We also had a couple of breakfasts at the newly-reopened-for-breakfast River Belle Terrace, but since those are not seasonal, I will save those for another week.
This week’s Pop! of the Week is actually a Dorbz: it’s Beetlejuice!
That’s it for this week. Hopefully, I will be back on a weekly schedule for a while. I’m going to try really hard. Sometimes, getting a blog done for the week feels like one more obligation that’s dragging me down. Most of the time, though, writing these things serves as a good distraction from whatever is stressing me out. So I want to focus on that part of it, and hope you all enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy the things that I write about.
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